Core Ultra 200S processors will soon work as intended – Intel reports on eliminating key problems

Intel has announced the first updates to fix performance issues with the Arrow Lake Core Ultra 200S series processors that were identified after their launch. The company said the updates will provide significant performance gains and fully restore the processors’ intended functionality.

Image source: Wikipedia.org

Several major issues have been identified, four of which have already been resolved.

• Lack of Performance & Power Management (PPM) package;
• Incorrect operation of Intel Application Performance Optimizer (APO);
• Crashes due to Easy Anti-Cheat;
• Incorrect BIOS settings.

The first reason was a missing PPM package, which is responsible for the interaction of Windows Power Plans with the processor. Its absence reduced performance by 6–30% depending on the load – a fix was released through Windows Update in November. In turn, Intel APO, which is responsible for optimizing performance in games, did not function due to the lack of PPM, which led to a loss of 2% to 14% of performance.

The third reason concerned BSOD (blue screen of death) crashes when launching games using Easy Anti-Cheat. However, Intel said that anti-cheat updates distributed by Epic Games fixed the issue. Finally, it was discovered that the BIOS event logs provided contained incorrect settings such as ring bus frequency, memory settings, power limits, and PCIe Resizable BAR support. This also affected productivity, reducing it by 2–14%. All new BIOS versions correct these errors.

Image Source: Intel

Currently, to resolve issues with Arrow Lake processors, users are advised to update their motherboard BIOS and install the latest version of Windows (build 26100.2314 or newer). However, the final BIOS update, which will provide additional performance gains, will be released in January. It is reported that the update will add a few more percentage gains in games, and new performance tests will be presented at CES 2025. At the same time, Intel clarified that for the new microcode (0x114) to work correctly, a CSME Firmware Kit update will be required. Also, some game patches, for example for Cyberpunk 2077, can significantly improve performance