Intel’s latest Arrow Lake CPU firmware reportedly offers little to no performance gains — users test the microcode ahead of launch on the ASRock Z890 Taichi OCF

The 0x114 microcode for Intel’s Core Ultra 200S (Arrow Lake) processor lineup has surfaced online at Overclock.net. This patch is believed to address the significant performance gaps.

However, forum users report negligible gains in performance. It is important to note that motherboard vendors have yet to officially release this microcode, which is apparent because it is not listed on any partner’s support page as of this writing.

Arrow Lake suffers from hefty latency penalties stemming from inherent architectural flaws. Since the memory controller is off-die on the SoC Tile, gaming performance takes a serious hit due to abysmal L3 access cycles. Leaks suggest that Intel’s Core Ultra 300 or Panther Lake CPUs might reintegrate the IMC into the CPU Tile. Nonetheless, Intel acknowledged these issues last month and promised a fix by early December through OS-level updates and BIOS patches.

Rumor has it that the upcoming 0x114 microcode is the long-awaited one-stop fix for Arrow Lake, which has leaked online. While we don’t recommend flashing microcodes from third-party sources, a few brave souls at Overclock.net did that just for experimentation, and to their dismay, the gains were non-existent. As a user reported, his Core Ultra 9 285K paired with the ASRock Z890 Taichi OCF saw a 6% drop in Cinebench R23 MT scores because of low clock speeds.

Yesterday, Cyberpunk 2077 received a new update that offered up to 33% better performance on Intel’s Core Ultra 200S processors. In the same forum, a user linked two benchmarks running a custom scene in Cyberpunk 2077 (1,2) and claimed an additional 3% gain in FPS with a 10% lower power draw – the validity of which we cannot verify.

As motherboard vendors still offer the older 0x113 microcode, let’s wait for the official release before jumping to conclusions. The supposedly lackluster gains could be attributed to the limited testing data, or the microcode doesn’t offer much. Since we’re almost halfway through December – past Intel’s deadline – expect a release in the form of a stable or beta BIOS update in a couple of days.