The rollout of Core Ultra 200S processors hasn’t gone according to Intel’s plans, with promises to “fix” the series following shortly after launch. The company still hasn’t clarified what these changes will entail, but it appears this will include changes to microcode. While this could boost baseline performance, it will impact enthusiasts’ abilities to overclock the chips.
According to overclock Skatter Bencher, Intel is planning “big changes to Arrow Lake VF behaviour with new uCode.” Bencher is referring to Voltage Frequency behaviour, which determines what voltage the CPU will operate at each frequency step. This isn’t an abnormal change, but Bencher claims “the changes make it difficult to determine overclocking strategies since the behaviour will be different depending on the ME package.”
There’s no word on when the patched microcode will be available outside of insiders like Bencher, but I imagine we’ll see a beta version enter the public domain sooner rather than later. It’s unclear whether this microcode will contain other points that address the BIOS-level issues that are apparently holding back the likes of Core Ultra 9 285K, but it seems likely.
Regardless of the impact to overclocking, any performance boost would be welcome among Core Ultra 200S processors. Despite Arrow Lake’s many architectural improvements, it often struggles to exceed the capabilities of its less efficient predecessor, let alone the likes of Ryzen 7 9800X3D.
Thankfully, this microcode and recently published Platform Power Management (PPM) driver could serve as a turning point for the architecture. According to motherboard manufacturers like ASRock, the latter can boost performance by up to 13.23% alone.
As AMD prepares its next batch of Ryzen 9000X3D processors, Intel needs to pick up the pace and plug whatever gaps it can to make its Core Ultra 200S series as competitive as it can be. After all, it’s not as if the company’s financials can stomach a flop right now.
