Intel has announced the final wave of updates aimed at its latest 200S Series processors and improving performance for these chips, which faced a rocky start and mixed results.
Intel's VP Client Computing Group and general technical spokesperson, Robert Hallock, has outlined what the second wave of updates (the first came back in November) for Arrow Lake look like over at CES 2025. These updates Intel hopes will shorten the distance between its internal performance expectations and the results seen by reviewers that tested these chips on release, including ourselves.
BIOS updates from December onwards rectify this issue, and Hallock says we can expect to see a "pretty healthy uplift" in certain workloads such as file compression and mathematical synthetic workloads.
As for the other updates that were previously applied, Intel says with the latest updates that both the 'Best Performance' setting and 'Balanced' setting in Windows power settings will provide the best performance by default. That, apparently, is a key step as Intel found "most users basically just stick with the balance plan by default."
Users on the balanced profile in Windows will see the most gain from the PPM, or performance and power management package, which is the means for controlling frequency ramping, waking up/sleeping specific cores, and how long they sustain maximum boost speeds.
"Any application that is sensitive to memory access or the performance of a small number of CPU threads will get a pretty generous kick from having this PPM system."
The balanced changes and PPM were automatically applied in previous Windows updates, but does outline the importance for anyone rocking an Arrow Lake system to update your Windows install to get the most out of your chip. Though, that said, Windows 24H2 has its own share of problems to work out.
In total, Intel expects a system with all the upgrades in recent weeks and months to make a pretty substantial difference to performance, including by reducing memory latency, which might help gaming performance in some systems.
"Our software for the 200S has reached full performance," Hallock notes.
Though he is also keen to point out that this really depends on the exact specs of a given system, so the exact benefit will vary a lot. Similarly, what we know of these chips and their performance anyways, I wouldn't expect a panacea for performance capable of knocking AMD's X3D chips off their lofty gaming performance perch.
How these updates now combine to boost performance for Arrow Lake, most of all in games, will require rebenchmarking these chips. In our tests over the past few months, we're not convinced we'll see major changes to the performance picture, due to Windows as much as anything else, but it'll all come out in testing.
In the meantime, this is about as good as any reason to keep your system and motherboard BIOS updated.
