Intel pledges to 'fix' Arrow Lake after launch 'didn't go as planned'

Intel’s latest “Arrow Lake” processor wasn’t up to snuff. On Friday, a key executive promised to outline went wrong, and to fix it.

On a podcast with Hot Hardware, Intel vice president and general manager Robert Hallock acknowledged that the Arrow Lake launch “didn’t go as planned.” That was evidenced in PCWorld’s Arrow Lake review and reviews by others.

Hallock was frank about what Intel needed to do: explain what went wrong, either by the end of November or early December, and then work to fix it.

“Here’s this old adage that we’ve talked about with journalists and hardware companies alike, that a new platform is hard,” Hallock said. “Anytime you radically overhaul anything, it presents new and sometimes unexpected challenges. And I think what people have been interested to hear is what happened.

“And I can’t go into all the details yet, but we, we’ve identified a series of issues, multi-factor,” Hallock said. “They’re at the OS level, they’re at the BIOS level. And I will say that the performance we saw in reviews — to be very clear, through no fault of reviewers — was not what we expected, not what we intended. The launch just didn’t go as planned, and that’s been a humbling lesson for all of us, and has kind of inspired a fairly large response internally to get to the bottom of what went happened and to fix it.”

Hallock said that, in one scenario, memory latencies climbed as high as 180 nanoseconds, rather than being closer 70 to 80 ns. “And that was so far off what we were anticipating or measuring,” Hallock said.

“I want to be very clear that we are accepting and internalizing the faults that this is on us, and we need to make it right,” Hallock said. Ideally, Intel would do that by November 30, he said, but he said that the explanation could stretch into December.

Games will specifically be addressed, Hallock added. “So those bars are going to be going back up to where they should be going,” he said.

It’s not exactly clear what Intel will do to fix Arrow Lake. Firmware and driver updates will certainly be included, but Hallock didn’t go into specifics.

Hallock declined to comment on the longevity of Arrow Lake’s socket, a position Intel has taken before. He also said that “reviewers didn’t have time” to test overclocking, something that he hoped reviewers would have had time to do.

“My commitment to you guys and to reviewers at large and to users is we’re going to come back with a full audit, an itemized list, and we’re going to explain every single one of these,” Hallock said. “What was the performance cost, what exactly happened, and what we’re going to do to fix it.”

Author: Mark Hachman, Senior Editor, PCWorld

Mark has written for PCWorld for the last decade, with 30 years of experience covering technology. He has authored over 3,500 articles for PCWorld alone, covering PC microprocessors, peripherals, and Microsoft Windows, among other topics. Mark has written for publications including PC Magazine, Byte, eWEEK, Popular Science and Electronic Buyers’ News, where he shared a Jesse H. Neal Award for breaking news. He recently handed over a collection of several dozen Thunderbolt docks and USB-C hubs because his office simply has no more room.

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