Copies of the chip have been sent out to reviewers under embargo and they have been quietly leaking the same story: there is a wild discrepancy between benchmarks, and they are running into crashes.

Apparently there are ten per cent differences from one test to another which does not sound promising.

Arrow Lake has also been spotted consuming crazy amounts of power, reaching up to 370 watts in a recent test. Considering that one of Intel’s selling points for Arrow Lake lies in its efficiency, this shows that the CPU can still put out a lot of performance. We’ll have to see whether that translates into real-world performance.

Moore’s Law Is Dead spoke about pertains to crashes, which is what many owners of Intel’s best CPUs have had to deal with during the Raptor Lake generation. Reportedly, reviewers are running into blue screens of death or issues with being booted out of online games due to a compatibility problem with the Intel Core Ultra 200-S.

The good news is that the problems are most likely not related to hardware. If all it takes is a microcode update, then users hopefully won’t have to wait too long for a fix.

Whether all of this checks out or not remains to be seen. Intel Arrow Lake goes on sale on Friday, which is when we’ll find out whether the reviews are in its favour or not.