Intel admits defeat on Arrow Lake — but it’s not down for the count

By Jacob Roach Published November 11, 2024

Intel’s Arrow Lake CPUs aren’t off to a great start. As you can read in our Core Ultra 9 285K review and Core Ultra 5 245K review, Intel’s latest CPUs miss the mark across productivity and gaming apps, and they’re miles away from some of the best processors you can buy right now. According to Intel, there are several issues with the new platform that it plans to address within a matter of weeks.

In an interview with HotHardware, Intel’s Robert Hallock was blunt about the release of Arrow Lake CPUs: “The launch didn’t go as planned … we have a number of things we got to go fix.” Hallock, formerly of AMD, is near the top of Intel’s technical marketing division. Although he didn’t address exactly what’s wrong with Arrow Lake, Hallock promised that Intel is working on updates that could significantly improve performance, and that they’ll arrive in a matter of weeks.

“There are BIOS, firmware, OS-level issues that we need to solve,” Hallock said. “We’re going to come back with a full audit, an itemized list, of what went wrong.”

It’s not exactly surprising that there’s something wrong with Arrow Lake. As we saw in our reviews of the processors, Intel pulled off some incredible feats with the new CPUs. For instance, the Core Ultra 9 285K, despite only having 24 threads, cleanly beats the 32-thread Ryzen 9 9950X in rendering applications like Cinebench. However, the new CPU takes a beating in games, especially compared to the new Ryzen 7 9800X3D.

The performance is disjointed. Intel makes big strides in some applications, while it’s woefully slow in others. Hallock admits that these issues aren’t the fault of users or reviews; he describes the issues with Arrow Lake as “self-inflicted.” Although Hallock didn’t provide a firm timeline for when we’ll see performance updates, they should arrive before the end of the year.

Hopefully, they’ll deliver the missing performance so many reviewers — including Digital Trends — spotted during the launch window. Intel has been falling on hard times as of late, with some reports indicating that a potential AMD buyout is on the table. Arrow Lake, with its radically new architecture, looked like a turning point for the company. Up to this point, however, it’s fallen significantly behind the competition from AMD, and even Intel’s own last-gen options. Hopefully, the promised updates will deliver good news.