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So, Intel's Core Ultra 9 Series 2 (Arrow Lake) CPUs started off badly with lower performance than the 14th gen Raptor Lake that they replaced and now the 0x114 microcode update that was claimed by Intel to fix this deficit actually causes a massive further 18% gaming performance drop.
This situation reminds me of the AMD Bulldozer fiasco of 2011 where it was so much slower than Intel's Sandy Bridge competition that it was embarrassing. It was long claimed that a BIOS update would fix this, but when it finally arrived many months later, it just did nothing, since the architecture was flawed and hence nothing could be done about it, not even a clock speed boost. The problem was that the "8" cores were actually siamesed as 2 cores in a block sharing resources rather than being wholly separate like in Sandy Bridge, which caused a significant bottleneck and the "8" cores came from having 4 of these blocks.
The fact it was called Bulldozer, a name suggesting power and strength when it actually delivered the opposite, really made it a laughing stock and now Intel's in a similar position, especially given that its competition is the performance leading AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D. Its only saving grace is that the AMD CPU is still out of stock everywhere and amazon.co.uk still doesn't even list it.
wccftech.com
Here's more than you ever wanted to know about the Bulldozer architecture:
en.wikipedia.org
This situation reminds me of the AMD Bulldozer fiasco of 2011 where it was so much slower than Intel's Sandy Bridge competition that it was embarrassing. It was long claimed that a BIOS update would fix this, but when it finally arrived many months later, it just did nothing, since the architecture was flawed and hence nothing could be done about it, not even a clock speed boost. The problem was that the "8" cores were actually siamesed as 2 cores in a block sharing resources rather than being wholly separate like in Sandy Bridge, which caused a significant bottleneck and the "8" cores came from having 4 of these blocks.
The fact it was called Bulldozer, a name suggesting power and strength when it actually delivered the opposite, really made it a laughing stock and now Intel's in a similar position, especially given that its competition is the performance leading AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D. Its only saving grace is that the AMD CPU is still out of stock everywhere and amazon.co.uk still doesn't even list it.
Intel's Newest "0x114" Microcode Reportedly Fails To Resolve "Arrow Lake-S" CPU Issues, Now Bringing In Up To 18% Performance Drop
Intel's newest "0x114" microcode apparently is unable to resolve the troublesome performance issues with Arrow Lake-S processors.
wccftech.com
Here's more than you ever wanted to know about the Bulldozer architecture:
