The release of Arrow Lake, the latest generation of Intel processor, opinions are generally unanimous among independent reviewers: despite some arguments on the energy consumption side, the new Core Ultra 200S clearly leave something to be desired in terms of performance raw, especially in game. But if we are to believe the brand, it is in fact an anomaly which should be resolved through an update shortly.
This information emerged in an interview with Robert Hallock, director of technical communications for the blue team, by the specialized media HotHardware. During the discussion, Dave Altavilla and Marco Chiappetta grilled the spokesperson on the disappointing performance of Arrow Lake CPUs, which have regularly been singled out since their arrival on the market. Indeed, all the benchmarkers obtained disappointing scores, generally lower than those of AMD's new Ryzen… but also compared to certain 13th and 14th generation Intel processors!
Obviously, this regression caused a lot of talk, since Arrow Lake was supposed to mark Intel's return to the right track after several complicated years. Some observers have even begun to assert that the historic leader of this industry could hardly recover from this debacle, in a context of the rise in power of ARM processors. But if Hallock is to be believed, it was simply a false start, and the best is yet to come.
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An optimization problem rather than an architectural one?
According to this defector from AMD who contributed to the success of Ryzen for 12 years before joining Intel last year, this disappointing performance is not linked to an intrinsic problem with Arrow Lake. Hallock states that the architecture itself is solid and efficient. He explains that the results obtained by all these third parties do not reflect the real quality of the product, and that Intel's internal tests were much more convincing – particularly in terms of latency, one of the main shortcomings pointed out by the testers. In fact, these fleas would simply suffer from a lack of maturity and optimization.
An encouraging statement, because in theory it implies that these issues could be fixed through a series of software updates. And according to Hallock, this is precisely what Intel plans to do. The company has already identified several issues that could partially explain this disappointing performance, and hopes to deploy several updates to remedy them before the end of the year.
Intel on a slippery slope
This is undoubtedly good news for customers. But in the current context where Intel's credibility continues to plummet, it is difficult not to interpret this announcement as a desperate attempt to save face. It will therefore be advisable to keep an eye on these famous updates. In practice, they are likely to seal the fate of Arrow Lake… with very concrete implications for the future of the company.
If these fixes provide a substantial performance gain, there will be reason to remain optimistic about Intel's current roadmap. But otherwise, this will only reinforce doubts about its ability to bounce back to defend the legitimacy of the x86 architecture. A decidedly worrying prospect since Intel is already practically out of the race on the ARM architecture, while Qualcomm, Nvidia and even AMD continue to advance their pawns in this area.
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