This “fix”, aimed at addressing "performance issues" in the Core Ultra 200S processors, has landed with a thud, offering measurable performance gains on a molecular scale.
For those unfamiliar with the ongoing saga, Arrow Lake’s latency woes result from an inspired design decision to place the memory controller off-die on the SoC Tile. This choice has gifted users with L3 cache access times that might be more at home in a museum than a modern CPU. Unsurprisingly, gamers and performance enthusiasts have reported a gaming experience akin to wading through treacle.
Chipzilla promised to address these issues in future CPUs, like the Core Ultra 300 series and Panther Lake. We’re assured that these forthcoming products will reintegrate the memory controller into the CPU Tile, presumably where it belonged all along.
Until then, the company insists it will patch up the current mess through operating system updates and BIOS tweaks—though early attempts by plucky users suggest this is more of a sticking plaster than a cure.
According to Chipguru3D the leaked 0x114 microcode, already tested by users with an ASRock Z890 Taichi OCF motherboard, has yet to impress. While Chipzilla's PR department might hope for glowing reports of transformative gains, the reality is that benchmark scores in Cinebench R23 multi-threaded tests have either stubbornly stayed the same or, in some cases, dipped ever so slightly.
The game Cyberpunk 2077—already a poster child for technical hiccups—recently rolled out its patch, claiming to boost performance by up to 33 per cent on the Core Ultra 200S processors. User benchmarks from custom scenes suggest a modest three per cent frame-rate increase, though these results remain unverified. Perhaps the two updates could team up for a combined improvement of… well, barely enough to notice.
Meanwhile, motherboard vendors are sticking to their guns and refusing to officially support 0x114, instead offering users the vintage delights of the older 0x113 microcode. With Chipzilla’s promised December deadline looming, a stable or beta BIOS update featuring 0x114 will eventually emerge. Until then, the advice is clear: hold tight and maybe don’t try squeezing blood from this particular stone.
If the lacklustre improvements of 0x114 seem baffling, they might be chalked up to insufficient testing or, more plausibly, the microcode simply not making much of a difference. After all, when you're trying to put out a raging inferno with a teacup of water, there’s only so much you can expect.
Arrow Lake owners are left to ponder whether they’ve unwittingly signed up for a beta testing programme disguised as a product release. But don’t worry—Panther Lake is just around the corner. And if that doesn’t solve the problems, there’s always hope that Chipzilla’s next patch will deliver the elusive performance boost we've all been waiting for. Or, at the least, not make things worse.
