Not this again: Intel Arrow Lake may have instability issues

We thought we'd seen the last of Intel instability issues with Raptor Lake, but Arrow Lake may have some problems of its own.

Oct 23, 2024 - 21:08

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Intel

Intel’s Arrow Lake is just a couple of days from hitting the market, and we’ve been inundated with various reports and leaked benchmarks. Today’s news doesn’t sound good, though. YouTuber Moore’s Law Is Dead reports that Arrow Lake, also referred to as Core Ultra 200-S, may have some instability issues — much like what we’ve seen Intel battle for months on end with Raptor Lake.

Before we dive in, keep in mind that all of this is yet to be confirmed, and we’re mere days away from finding out whether it’s true or not. However, it could give some buyers a reason to hold off and read the reviews before preordering the CPUs. Moore’s Law Is Dead talked about various reviewers and tech YouTubers who had something bad to say about Arrow Lake’s stability. The issues are twofold: A wild discrepancy between benchmarks, and running into crashes.

According to the YouTuber, reviewers (who remain anonymous) report an up to 10% difference from one test to another, making for quite inconsistent performance for Arrow Lake. We’ve also seen this in leaked benchmarks — some bode very well for Intel, while others don’t sound promising at all.

Nvidia RTX 5080 Picture Leak | Intel Arrow Lake Instability

Arrow Lake has also been spotted consuming crazy amounts of power, reaching up to 370 watts in a recent test. Considering that one of Intel’s selling points for Arrow Lake lies in its efficiency, this shows that the CPU can still put out a lot of performance. We’ll have to see whether that translates into real-world performance.

Another issue that Moore’s Law Is Dead spoke about pertains to crashes, which is what many owners of Intel’s best CPUs have had to deal with during the Raptor Lake generation. Reportedly, reviewers are running into blue screens of death or issues with being booted out of online games due to some sort of a compatibility problem with the Intel Core Ultra 200-S.

The good news is that, according to Moore’s Law Is Dead, the problems — if they exist — are most likely not related to hardware. If all it takes is a microcode update, then users hopefully won’t have to wait too long for a fix.

Whether all of this checks out or not remains to be seen. Intel Arrow Lake goes on sale on Friday, which is when we’ll find out whether the reviews are in its favor or not.

Monica J. White

Monica is a computing writer at Digital Trends, focusing on PC hardware. Since joining the team in 2021, Monica has written…

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