Intel Core Ultra 200S performance issues traced to missing PPM package; four out of five problems resolved

Intel has shared the results of its investigation into the performance hiccups that popped up during the October launch of its Core Ultra 200S (Arrow Lake-S) processors. Five different problems affected the platform’s performance. Intel has already fixed four of them, and the last one is on track to be sorted out by January 2025.

The investigation started on October 26, and one big issue they found was a missing Performance & Power Management (PPM) package. This caused erratic behavior: CPUs didn’t schedule tasks right, performance varied when cores were disabled, and memory latency sometimes spiked to double what it should’ve been. Intel figures this one problem alone caused performance to drop from 6 percent to 30 percent, depending on what the system was doing.

Another issue came from the Intel Application Performance Optimizer (APO), which just didn’t work because that PPM package wasn’t there. This malfunction meant the expected gaming performance boosts never showed up, leading to losses somewhere between 2 percent and 14 percent. On top of that, systems were crashing whenever people tried launching games that use Easy Anti-Cheat, thanks to some compatibility problems with Windows 11 24H2.

They also spotted some BIOS setup inconsistencies on the review units. Key features like PCIe Resizable BAR, compute tile ring frequency, and memory controller ratios weren’t all set up the same way, which caused performance to take another hit—around 2 percent to 14 percent, depending on the app and the BIOS settings.

Intel has already tackled most of these problems. The PPM and APO issues were patched up in Windows 11 build 26100.2161 (KB5044384). Epic Games released a new Easy Anti-Cheat driver, and new BIOS updates for Intel Z890-based motherboards were released.

The last piece of the puzzle is a performance optimization package, which needs firmware updates and is scheduled to drop in January 2025. These updates will come with Intel microcode version 0x114 and Intel CSME Firmware Kit 19.0.0.1854v2.2 or newer. Once installed, they should give gamers minor but helpful performance gains across various titles.

Intel plans to present a full performance review at CES 2025, with detailed benchmarks and comparison tests. It has also implemented new measures to prevent similar problems from occurring again.