This past week Intel published an Intel Core Ultra 200S Series “Arrow Lake” performance status update following mixed reviews since launch around the Arrow Lake gaming performance that were inconsistent with Intel’s internal findings. Among Intel’s findings detailed in their report this past week were some new BIOS performance optimizations, some misconfigured performance settings in early/reviewer BIOSes, and also some Windows 11 updates being pushed down to help with different performance issues. ASUS already started releasing new BIOSes that incorporate the 0x114 Arrow Lake intended to help the situation. While it’s been a Windows-focused issue, I couldn’t help but to run Intel Arrow Lake performance comparison benchmarks on Linux with the new microcode / BIOS.
Following Intel’s public report, motherboard vendors have begun rolling out new BIOS updates that incorporate the 0x114 microcode for Arrow Lake S processors. Further BIOS updates are expected in January but being curious if the initial updates are anything meaningful for Linux users, I spent the holiday weekend running benchmarks with the Core Ultra 9 285K.
The ASUS ROG MAXIMUS Z890 HERO motherboard I have been using for my Arrow Lake S testing received a new BIOS update on the 18th that incorporates the Intel 0x114 microcode as well as shipping other updated components. A number of Phoronix readers have been asking me if these Intel Arrow Lake software updates would have any meaningful impact to Linux use, so it was onward with some holiday benchmarks.
So for this article is a comparison with the ASUS ROG MAXIMUS Z890 HERO with Intel Core Ultra 9 285K while running the prior 1101 BIOS with 0x113 microcode compared to the new 1203 BIOS with 0x114 microcode. No other hardware or software changes were made besides upgrading the system BIOS and keeping the same BIOS settings across the prior and new BIOS.
From there this BIOS/microcode comparison then saw over 100 benchmarks carried out on Ubuntu Linux for not only gaming/graphics but a variety of other workloads too in using a wide swath of benchmarks to look for any performance changes.
