Intel has publicly held up its hands and admitted that its new Intel Arrow Lake gaming CPU release didn’t go according to plan, saying that it found the experience “humbling.” However, the company says it’s already working on new updates that could help boost performance, in an effort to make its new Intel Core Ultra gaming CPUs more appealing to gamers.
Intel has had a truly terrible year, with the previous Intel Raptor Lake lineup suffering from catastrophic voltage faults that caused irreparable CPU damage, and the new Intel Arrow Lake launch hasn’t helped on the gaming front, as we found in our recent Core Ultra 7 265K review. Meanwhile, its arch-rival AMD is once again holding the crown for the best gaming CPU, as we found in our AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D review last week.
In an interview with HotHardware, shown in the video below, Intel executive Robert Hallock admitted that the Arrow Lake launch “didn’t go as planned” for the chip maker and that early reviews were “not what [Intel] expected and not what [Intel] intended.” Hallock says that the launch was a “humbling lesson” for Intel but that the company has already identified some “multifactor issues at the OS level, at the BIOS level” that could be to blame.
Despite the “self-inflicted wounds” caused by the botched Core Ultra release, Intel isn’t giving up at the first hurdle to try and get Arrow Lake CPU performance where it should be. Hallock didn’t have anything specific to share just yet, but given his comments, new BIOS updates and future Windows updates could address the problem in the near future.
Until then, however, Intel is being left far behind, trailing in the dust, when it comes to winning the battle for the hearts and minds of gamers. In our own testing, the Core Ultra 7 265K Arrow Lake CPU vastly underperforms as a gaming processor, performing substantially worse than the Core i9 14900K, Intel’s last-gen Raptor Lake flagship.
Right now, if you’re thinking about buying an Intel Arrow Lake gaming CPU, it’s worth waiting to see what happens when, or if, Intel is able to address these performance issues first. If Intel is able to boost performance, then it might just be able to turn the Arrow Lake lineup into a force that can really compete against AMD.
In the meantime, check out our Intel Arrow Lake guide next for the full rundown of this new CPU launch. For the moment, we recommend the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D as one of the best gaming CPUs that you can actually buy, especially in the face of 9800X3D stock shortages at the moment.