Intel explains what went wrong with its new Arrow Lake desktop CPUs

Intel's new Core Ultra 200-series desktop processors, codenamed Arrow Lake, launched to seriously underwhelming reviews back in October. Now the American firm has collated five issues that it says are to blame for the difference between its own performance expectations and what reviewers experienced, with four of the five problems described as being already resolved by BIOS, Windows or application updates, and further performance enhancements to arrive in January 2025.

For context, ourCore i9 285K and Core i5 245K reviewsaw performance wins for the 285K against the outgoing 14900K in three titles -Crysis 3 Remastered,Dragon's Dogma 2andForza Horizon 5- while the 14900K retained its crown in the other eight games we tested, often by extreme margins.

Here are the five issues, their root cause and current status, quoted from Intel's release:

The table makes for interesting reading, andIntel's community blogon the subject goes into further detail on each identified issue too. In it, Intel promises "a complete performance digest, inclusive of the January BIOSes" at CES early next year, so we should get a better idea of exactly the performance differentials we should expect with all five fixes applied.

We also saw extremely poor performance inCyberpunk 2077in particular, and that seems to have been solved in game update 2.2 ifthe patch notesare to be believed.

If you are one of the vanishingly small number of people to be running a Core i5 245K, Core i7 265K or Core i9 285K system, then you've probably already updated to the latest Windows and BIOS versions, but it's worth doing so now if you haven't - and again in mid January when further BIOS updates are made available - to ensure that your system is delivering maximum performance. Intel says that the January BIOSes can be "identified with Intel microcode version 0x114 and Intel CSME Firmware Kit 19.0.0.1854v2.2 (or newer)."

We'll look to retest the Core i9 285K and Core i5 245K once these January BIOS updates are available, as we did see much worse performance than we expected and it would be nice to see what these proccessors are truly capable of. We're expecting to hear more from Intel at that time - as well as rivals AMD and Nvidia - so stay tuned for our reports from CES in the new year.