Intel Core Ultra 200S CPUs may see a significant performance boost with the new BIOS update

The Intel Core Ultra 200S CPUs had a relatively negative launch due to the barrage of unfavorable reviews. All major tech outlets were simply not impressed with the new Intel Core Ultra 200S series. The processor series had no obvious major flaw but failed to beat its Ryzen counterparts and delivered less performance than its predecessor.

However, Intel is preparing to release a new BIOS update to fix the issues and supposedly provide a significant performance boost to its Core Ultra series of processors.

In this article, we will explain the issues behind the not-so-impressive performance of the Intel Core Ultra 200S series of CPUs and what sort of performance improvement you can expect from the new BIOS update.

Note: Some aspects of this article are subjective and solely reflect the writer's opinions. Take the leaked data with a grain of salt.

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What issues plague the new Intel Core Ultra 200S CPUs?

Intel Core Ultra 9 285K (Image via Intel)

The Core Ultra 200S CPUs had many issues. Intel failed to deliver better performance than its predecessors in productivity and gaming. Even in synthetic benchmarks, the multi-core score of the new processors was lower than the Core i9-14900K.

The Core Ultra 200S CPUs did bring significant power efficiency but failed to convince users. However, Intel recently published a field guide where the company explained what was wrong with the Ultra processors and why they were performing less than expected.

According to Intel's Field Update community post, a couple of issues related to the Power Plan Management (PPM) settings of the new Core Ultra 200S CPUs are the culprits behind the performance regression.

The unstable PPM disrupted the power management and scaling services, such as Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS), Core Parking, and C-states, and prevented them from working correctly. This is why we saw a lower-than-expected performance in the reviews.

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Can Intel fix the issues of the new Intel Core Ultra 200S CPUs and improve their performance?

Intel Core Ultra 9 architecture (Image via Intel)

The good thing is Intel has identified all the issues of the Core Ultra 200S CPUs within the BIOS and ME firmware, and is working on the fixes already. A few users have received a new BIOS update for testing and are seeing some performance improvements.

The final fixes will be delivered in January 2025 via a new BIOS update, which will potentially fix the performance of the new processors.

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What sort of performance improvements can you expect from the new BIOS update?

It's hard to guess what kind of performance improvements the BIOS update will deliver since the final BIOS revision hasn't arrived yet. However, users of the MYDrivers site received a version of the new BIOS update and saw some performance improvements already.

Here are some of the improvements the MYDrivers site observed with the latest BIOS update:

Benchmarks	Intel Core Ultra 9 285K performance score (Old BIOS)	Intel Core Ultra 9 285K performance score (New BIOS)
Cinebench R23 (Single-core)	2978	3344
Cinebench R23 (Multi-core)	21855	22152

With the newer BIOS update, the single-core performance of the flagship CPU, Intel Core Ultra 9 285K, increased by about 12.3%. On the other hand, the multi-core only received a 1.3% improvement, which could be just the margin of error. In many games, the single-core score matters more than the multi-core, and a 12.3% improvement could give games a nice boost in FPS.

However, keep in mind that this isn't an actual gaming benchmark, and we will have to wait for that until it releases. Also, it is quite possible that the BIOS version MYDrivers site received isn't final yet, and there could be even more improvements.