Intel's New Arrow Lake Chips May Be Slowing Down Your Blazing-Fast SSDs
If you've been eyeing Intel's new Core Ultra 200 series processors, or Arrow Lake, for your next gaming PC build, there's a potential fly in the ointment you should know about. Some keen-eyed reviewers and enthusiasts spotted a glitch where these new chips don't seem to enable PCIe 5.0 SSDs to use their legs to their maximum. Intel has since confirmed they're aware of the issue and laid out the explanation for it.
What's the Performance Hit We're Referring To?
So, by how much slower are we speaking? Well, in our reviews and tests, particularly with motherboards featuring the high-end Z890 chipset, newest-gen PCIe 5.0 SSDs were running at about 2 GB/s behind when they were paired with legacy Raptor Lake processors and Z790 motherboards. That is a significant decline when you are anticipating top-shelf speeds.
To provide some real-world instances:
- The Samsung 9100 Pro, which is a high-speed drive, also achieved around 12.3 GB/s with Arrow Lake when it was around 14.3 GB/s with Raptor Lake.
- Even the Micron 4600 showed the same decline, posting around 12.3 GB/s instead of its usual 14.3 GB/s with the last generation platform.
Why is This Happening? Intel Weighs In
When technology websites reached out to motherboard makers like ASUS and ASRock, the answer suggested a latency issue in one part of the CPU called the IOE Tile (I/O Extender). It seems the first 16 PCIe lanes, which are usually assigned to the primary graphics card, are handled directly by the primary portion of the System on a Chip (SoC). But the lanes used by super-high-speed NVMe drives (21-24, in this case) are handled differently, and that's where this slowdown is occurring.
Can This Be Fixed with an Update?
Sadly, the rumor on the street, based on the reporters investigating the matter, is that this specific issue is not something that can be fixed with a firmware or software patch. It seems to be a feature at the hardware level of the Arrow Lake design.
What does this portend for the future?
We'll have to wait and see if Intel ever does anything about this when they create their next-gen CPUs. Meanwhile, if squeezing every last bit of performance out of a PCIe 5.0 SSD is your number one, top priority, this is something to keep in mind when shopping to purchase an Arrow Lake-based system.
