Digest and the day after: Intel’s Arrow Lake S in the mirror of the editors’ comments

Of course, it’s not just me who has my own personal opinion on Intel’s Arrow Lake S, but many other colleagues too. That’s why I’ve summarized the most important conclusions and assessments for me and put these summaries, which don’t necessarily have to coincide with mine, together again for discussion in the forum. I am sure that our community is mature enough to post the comments without prior review. But yesterday’s launch was so contrary for me and I initially had a lot of self-doubt when testing it that I simply wanted to do this format of an Editors Digest. Because I know from many phone calls and chats that I was not alone in this.

Here are the selected and uncommented opinions of my colleagues about the subject. If I’ve forgotten anyone, it wasn’t malicious intent, but simply a question of time and the overflowing flood of information…

Computerbase

Intel Core Ultra 200S aka Arrow Lake is an efficient disappointment. Despite the delays, the jump to the chiplet approach, new cores and the late-announced switch to TSMC’s flagship manufacturing, Intel hasn’t managed to outperform the stale predecessor architecture without exception. Core Ultra 9 285K, Core Ultra 7 265K and Core Ultra 5 245K show some considerable progress in efficiency compared to their predecessors, but in terms of performance they not only lose the gaming duel against AMD Ryzen 7000X3D, but also against Core i9-14900K, Core i7-14700K and Core i5-14600K. In applications that are not extremely reliant on the memory system (7-Zip), this is successful, but there is also a downer here: Ryzen 9000X is more efficient out of the box. It only becomes unbeatably efficient far below the factory settings … The comparison with AMD is also apt in another respect: both companies have somewhat swapped roles. While AMD was always ahead in applications and inferior in games in the early years of Zen, it is now the other way around: Intel is strong in applications, but far behind in games – as was the case with Ryzen 1000 at the start.

PCGH

At the moment, we’re still having some trouble with Arrow Lake. With the new tile-based architecture for desktops, including the NPU and Xe-IGP (Alchemist, not Battlemage!), Intel is offering an interesting overall package. However, something still seems to be off when you look at gaming performance. Strangely, the performance in applications is on point. We’ve conducted extensive tests but haven’t been able to pinpoint the “issue” with gaming performance. As a result, we can’t give a final verdict yet. Overall, though, we recognize the potential of the new architecture: the omission of HTT contributes to efficiency, as does TSMC’s optimized N3 manufacturing. If Intel can boost frame rates, the fps-per-watt rating will improve further. That aside, Arrow Lake now has to hit the market and prove itself, especially since the new Ryzen 9000 with 3D V-Cache is on the horizon for gamers, while content creators have been using AMD’s 12- and 16-core chips for months. The NPU alone won’t convince anyone to upgrade.

Hardwareluxx

Finally, we come to the platform and the question of whether it’s worth investing in LGA1851. Originally, Meteor Lake was also planned for the desktop. But Intel probably scrapped that plan for a good reason, as the first disaggregated design still showed many weaknesses, which have only been addressed with Lunar Lake and now Arrow Lake. Even now, the Core Ultra 200S series isn’t running perfectly smoothly. With Meteor Lake and Arrow Lake, there would have been two CPU generations for the LGA1851. Intel hasn’t officially commented on this, but if things go poorly for consumers, Arrow Lake could end up being the only CPU generation for the LGA1851, leaving those who invest in this platform in a dead end right from the start. Recently, rumors surfaced about an Arrow Lake refresh, but more than just a refresh shouldn’t be expected. AMD’s long-lasting AM4 and AM5 sockets certainly have their drawbacks in terms of flexibility. However, when their cycle is adjusted to new DDR and PCI-Express standards, such a long-lasting platform becomes a strong argument for consumers, which AMD is currently leveraging perfectly.

Tom’s Hardware US

Intel’s Core Ultra 9 285K makes strong gains in productivity workloads, but it struggles to match its prior-gen counterpart in gaming performance. That leaves AMD’s competing chips as a better value for gaming, while low pricing on the previous-gen Core i9-14900K will provide competition from within Intel’s own lineup.

WCCFTECH

Arrow Lake has both good and bad things. Performance is definitely the worst part as we are only seeing marginal gains and we might have to wait for future microcodes, patches, and optimizations to address these shortcomings. In that regard, it’s better to stick with Ryzen 7000/9000 or Intel 12 and 13th Gen CPUs. But if you are tired of the higher power consumption and thermal issues affecting your chips or worry about potential degradation, then Arrow Lake is a good platform. Surely you will miss out on the performance aspects and the upcoming Ryzen 9000X3D CPUs do look far more exciting of a launch for gamers and enthusiasts but the platform as a whole has a lot to offer, especially if you aim to knock your pants off with some extreme memory overclocking. I would advise waiting for the Ryzen 9000X3D to make an informed and intelligent decision.

Phoronix (Linux)

The generational Raptor Lake to Arrow Lake performance is more impressive when factoring in power use. The Core Ultra 9 285K on average was at around 136 Watts during the entire span of workloads tested, right inline with the average of 137 Watts on the Ryzen 9 9950X and much lower than the 156 Watt average with the Core i9 14900K. The Core Ultra 9 285K did have a peak recorded power use at 248 Watts, above the 201 Watts found with the Ryzen 9 9950X but at least much lower than the 347 Watt peak with the i9-14900K. The power efficiency improvements with Arrow Lake are real. The few Linux gaming tests showed the performance regressing compared to the Core i9 14900K but with much better power efficiency. Across various other workloads was decent generational improvements in raw performance for areas like code compilation, some HPC tasks in cases where AVX-512 isn’t utilized, and various other creator and developer workloads. The 24 physical cores with the Core Ultra 9 285K was enough to outperform the 32-thread Ryzen 9 9950X in many code compilation tasks, some MPI workloads, and more, but in areas leveraging AVX-512 like AI and many creator workloads, the AMD Ryzen 9 9900 series continued to dominate.

Techpowerup

Intel remains a powerhouse with innovation, and the Core Ultra 2-series Arrow Lake seems to keep Intel on track to remain a market leader for desktop processors. With every processor generation, Intel promises a generational performance uplift, either from increased IPC of its cores, or more CPU cores, or increased clock speeds, besides increased power efficiency. Intel’s play with “Arrow Lake” is to deliver on noticeable IPC increases, which translate to minor gaming performance gains, significant productivity performance gains from the massively improved “Skymont” E-cores, and an overall improvement in the processor’s efficiency and performance/Watt from the switch to the new 3 nm TSMC foundry node for the Compute tile. Interestingly, this is a similar endpoint as Zen 5 offered over Zen 4, with significant architecture and efficiency advances that didn’t translate well for gaming, but offered leaps forward in productivity … Intel is hoping for a win. The company may be holding on to its market share in all its client and data-center markets, but investors don’t seem too happy with Intel stock. The company needs to gain the confidence of these investors, and the success of Arrow Lake will play a big role.

Techspot

So, there we have it – a chaotic mix of results that often don’t seem to make much sense. Clearly, Intel has a significant number of issues to resolve, and while we didn’t expect them to flawlessly execute a new platform and CPU architecture release, we had hoped for a much more polished product. Depending on the hardware and software configuration, stability can be an issue, though we expect this to be addressed fairly quickly. However, it’s something worth keeping in mind. We notified Intel about the poor gaming performance, and while they’ve offered a few solutions, none have worked to a degree that we find satisfactory. As it stands, gaming performance is inconsistent, to say the least. Overall, this is very disappointing for a next-generation flagship product. If Intel can’t make significant improvements, Arrow Lake could end up being a poor choice for gaming. In terms of productivity, the 285K performs better, but it’s still not exceptional. While there are certainly workloads where it excels, there are many where its performance is underwhelming compared to the 14900K and 9950X. One area where the 285K has massively improved over the 14900K is power efficiency, which is great news. However, in most cases, it’s still far from where it needs to be to truly compete with AMD.

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