Intel claims that four issues causing poor performance in Intel Core Ultra 200 gaming CPUs are now fixed, with one further update planned.

Intel’s new Arrow Lake CPUs came out in October promising high performance at lower power levels, but reviews, including ours, noted surprisingly lackluster gaming performance. Tom Warren said of the Core Ultra 9 285K, “...in many titles, it provides worse performance than the 14th Gen chips it was designed to replace.”

Intel rounds off its blog by saying that it has identified further BIOS improvements that it's currently in the process of validating and is targeting a firmware release, with all these updates and microcode 0x114, sometime in late January. It plans on presenting all of these findings in detail at CES 2025.

Intel Arrow Lake desktop CPU performance issues explained by new company blog post outlining fixes which will take through January 2025 at least to roll out.

In light of such performance numbers, Intel's Vice President and General Manager, Robert Hallock, announced last month that an investigation was underway. The company hopes to restore gaming performance to its original targets and share details this month.

In the last Leo Says, Leo discussed Intel's statement that it would deliver five fabrication nodes in four years. These are bold claims that were immediately challenged by news that Intel would ditch its own 20A process in Arrow Lake and would instead use the TSMC N3

As if Intel didn't have enough problems this year, it's recent "Arrow Lake" processors arrived with performance issues, especially in gaming.

The Core Ultra 200S had four problems at launch, which have now been resolved. A further BIOS update for more performance will follow.