The Intel Core Ultra 200S's performance issues are attributable to the lack of a PPM package; four out of five problems are solved

Intel reported its performance survey results that emerged during the October launch of its Core Ultra 200S (Arrow Lake-S) processors to the address. Five different issues affected the platform's performance. Intel has already fixed four of them, and the last one is on track to be fixed by January 2025.

The investigation began on October 26, and one of the main issues discovered was the lack of a Performance & Power Management (PPM) package. This issue caused erratic behavior: CPUs did not schedule tasks correctly, performance fluctuated when cores were disabled, and memory latency sometimes reached double what it should have been. Intel estimates that this issue alone caused a performance drop of 6 to 30 percent, depending on system activity.

Another problem came from the Intel Application Performance Optimizer (APO), which simply didn't work because the PPM package wasn't there. This malfunction meant that expected improvements in gaming performance never appeared, resulting in losses of between 2% and 14%. Additionally, systems crashed whenever trying to launch games using Easy Anti-Cheat, due to compatibility issues with Windows 11 24H2.

They also spotted inconsistencies in the BIOS configuration on the units examined. Key features like PCIe Resizable BAR, compute ring frequency, and memory controller ratios were not all configured the same, resulting in a performance drop of around 2 to 14%, depending on application and BIOS settings.

Intel has already addressed most of these issues. PPM and APO issues have been fixed in Windows 11 build 26100.2161 (KB5044384). Epic Games has released a new Easy Anti-Cheat driver and new BIOS updates for Intel Z890 motherboards.

The final piece of the puzzle is a performance optimization package, which requires firmware updates and is expected to be available in January 2025. These updates will come with Intel microcode version 0x114 and the CSME Firmware Kit Intel 19.0.0.1854v2.2 or newer. Once installed, they should provide players with minor but useful performance gains in various titles.

Intel plans to present a full performance analysis at CES 2025, with detailed benchmarks and comparison tests. The company has also implemented new measures to prevent similar issues from recurring.