Saturday, November 9th 2024
Intel Working on Fixing "Arrow Lake" Gaming Performance with Upcoming Patches
In an exclusive interview with Hot Hardware, Intel acknowledged that its recently launched Core Ultra 200 desktop processors, codenamed "Arrow Lake," have significant performance issues. However, Intel announced that a set of fixes are being developed. As our review confirmed, the launch of these new processors fell short of both consumer expectations and Intel's own projections, particularly in gaming performance, despite showing promise in productivity, content creation, and some AI workloads. In a discussion during a recent livestream, Intel's Robert Hallock, VP and general manager of client AI and technical marketing, addressed these concerns head-on, describing the Arrow Lake launch as "disastrous" and attributing the underwhelming performance to inadequately optimized systems.
Source:
Hot Hardware
Robert HallockI can't go into all the details yet, but we identified a series of multifactor issues at the OS level, at the BIOS level, and I will say that the performance we saw in reviews is not what we expected and not what we intended. The launch just didn't go as planned. That has been a humbling lesson for all of us, inspiring a fairly large response internally to get to the bottom of what happened and to fix it.Additionally, Hallock indicated that users can expect these updates to begin rolling out by the end of the month or shortly after that. The tech community awaits independent verification of these performance improvements, which could restore confidence in Intel's Arrow Lake platform and potentially reshape the current CPU performance hierarchy. Given that the promise is a "significant" performance uplift, we expect to see some interesting numbers as Intel's cores are performant from the microarchitectural standpoint. The mix of Windows and BIOS updates will be interesting to measure in the coming weeks. Here is the link to the video interview of the Hot Hardware crew and Robert Hallock.
91 Comments on Intel Working on Fixing "Arrow Lake" Gaming Performance with Upcoming Patches
Anyway this new architecture works similarly to mobile processors, trying to complete tasks as fast as it can before rising power consuption too much. Sure if pushed to its limit it consumes a lot but in normal processing it's meant to be able to complete its job consuming less.
Many childish salty comments reminds me the smartass kids that - when nvidia changed its traditiona gpu architecture and designed Fermi architecture for its 400 series but TSMC didn't reduce in time its cmos size so the gpu had a lot of problems of overheating... - claimed nvidia was dead, it was about to fail, nvidia wasn't able to design gpu anymore and such idiotic and arrogant statements.
I think we know how it ended up.
Not sure Intel is in the same promising position but surely they are changing many things at technological level and at corporate structure level and they are improving overall their business. I'm pretty sure this last architecture will improve enough its performance in the very next months.
4 E-cores share an L3 cache slice
1 P core uses its own L3 cache slice.
Oddly enough AMD's CCD's are slightly thicker than on Zen 5 than they were on Zen 4.
Intel has thinned the tile dies compared to the older monolithic dies because of the added layer of [EMBI] silicon interposer which is "Foveros".
The only problem I see currently with arrow lake is the L3 cache slices should all be once peice & connect to each P-core. Old Zen 2 architecture used two 16Mb L3 caches slice to split up a quadrant of cores or "CCX's" inside of the CCD's which resulted in a performance loss.
2. AVX-512 is entirely possible on client segment, regardless of E-cores. Intel chose to disable it to simplify platform validation and for market segmentation purposes. Remember, Intel is very fond of their SKU spam and segmentation, while AMD just unlocked everything and enabled ECC regardless of model you buy. They clearly feel that the consumer-grade segment doesn't need it.
3. I do not think Intel lacks vision. They, however, lack execution and they keep screwing up time and time again. The "14th" re-heat fiasco, low-level firmware bugs, delays in their graphics products, etc. - things aren't looking so hot. Well let's be fair. The 9800X3D, while still manageable, was the one guilty of that. It's a pretty bad regression vs. the 7800X3D in this area.
Never been happy with how close reviewers are to these companies, and the extra loops consumers have to jump through.
But anyway it seems we have a few weeks and by then we should have something released, then I guess new testing and feedback from people. You should see Android.
There is a different scheduler configuration across half a dozen app states.
Just watch the first 5 seconds and it's enough, there is a 10+% difference between the 2.
Win 11
Win 10
Remember, reviewers have given Intel plenty of fighting chance by benchmarking exclusively in Windows 11 23H2 - because in the version that is now rolling out, 24H2, AMD gains additional performance across several generations, while Intels “Arrow Lake” just appears to be broken. So even when benchmarking newly released AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D they benchmarked it in 23H2, citing apparent bugs in 24H2 - but not explicitly saying the bugs are mainly instability and lower performance in new Intel CPUs.
Isn’t that a bit of a preferential treatment of a company that still holds 70% of market share in desktop CPUs, even when releasing measurably crappier product? Should they be given such treatment, especially given their history of unlawful practices of achieving and maintaining this market dominance?
So Intel has a lot of work to do to even reach a crappy last gen performance level in new Windows version - because sooner or later everyone will get that update, in the end even the reviewers.
There's no right or wrong here. I agree with a review using 23H2 and agree with one using 24H2. Those are different perspectives and use cases users can extrapolate information out of suiting their own kind of use behavior.
I buy generic hardware which run on current, past and future software. Not a windows 11 only processor. My software will crash on "fake" E-Cores. I called them early "Fake" Cores.
In my point of view those E-Cores belong to a plugin card like a sound-card, as they are a different architecture in the first place. Like an accelerator card.
-- When you only run Windows 11 it will not really matter if the architecture is fully backward compatible. It will not really matter which instructions are supported by the processor on how many cores. The user will most likely not bother with compilers. I do not think so.
First the high power consumption. The one or two processor generartion a new mainboard flaw.
Since Intel 12th generation it's a mixed core processor flaw also.
The hole E-Cores makes software optimising a nonsense game. I do not want to optimise for a intel 80486 because of some E-cores (I hope you get my point 5th gen? 6th generation intel i core generation. // for the younger generation intel 80486 is a very, very old processor from around 1990)
I do not see any decent software support for those E-cores in linux. Linux is only the kernel. I do read all those new options I'm offered with every new kernel build. (make oldconfig) The other parts from gnu linux is from different projects. When I look how many years that 12th generation intel processor is already available with that e-cores feature, it's very bad software wise.
I doubt those BSD and other choices have any optimisations for those e-cores at all.
-- The lack of AVX512 makes it a no buy for myself anyway. I need that instruction.
Kind of a clueless statement from Hallock tho. Intel's not able to run a few benchmarks on their own? They just do the launch and wait for reviews, hoping for the best? :confused: It doesn't add up lol
Marketing also decides where and how a product will be sold. This also explains why a company doesn't sell some of its products in a specific country: The US best-selling Ford F-150 is sold in limited quantity in select countries in Europe because trucks are just not that hot in the EU compared to the US. Small SUV/Hatchback is what is hot in the EU. Marketers are the people figuring that stuff out, because an engineer (it seems like you would rather have an engineer handling all that stuff) doesn't have the time, or the will to deal with that kind of stuff.
Price slashes, bundles, and special offers are also marketing ;)