Upcoming Intel Core Ultra 200K processors are rumoured to have inconsistent performance, bugs, and instabilities. While the others may be fixed, the low performance could simply be by design.
According to El Chapuzas Informatico, Intel’s latest Core Ultra 200K desktop processors are causing a bit of trouble for many. Aside from the general instability of the LGA1851 platform, the outlet indicates that some face inconsistent results that are far from what they expect, while others mention blue screens and game crashes. Some even talk about a 10% reduction in performance, putting the top dog Core Ultra 9 285K behind a two-year-old i9-13900K. Lastly, some report being kicked from online games by anti-cheat systems that can’t recognise the new CPUs.
That said, the outlet didn’t share its sources, only listing the above issues. It even indicated that these are generalities and not concrete data, leaving much room for misinterpretation.
Scary news if correct, as the brand just dealt with a massive backlash due to its faulty 13th- and 14th-gen Core CPUs. These suffered from degradation due to abnormal voltage commands caused by an error in the microcode. Team Blue claims that this issue has been resolved with the 0x12B microcode fixes, but if a new problem arises – especially on a new platform – all these efforts could be in vain. And with AMD announcing both price cuts for its existing Ryzen 9000X and the imminent arrival of the Ryzen 9000X3D chips, Intel has no room for error.
If I had to guess, I would say some of these bugs, if not all, are caused by early code that can be fixed via updates. Remember, when Intel first moved to its big-little core design, Windows didn’t know how to properly manage its resources, causing low performance in many games and even bans on others that didn’t recognise the CPU. The same could be happening here since Intel is once more making changes by removing hyperthreading and using a new tile design featuring an NPU.
In any case, we should know more tomorrow when the Core Ultra 200K reviews get published. Hopefully, nothing bad is hiding inside these new chips, as we really need some competition to drive up innovation.
