Editor's take: It's no secret that Intel is in a very tight spot right now. The company that invented the microprocessor doesn't seem to understand how to make great products anymore, and users are suffering significant performance issues as a consequence. Intel changed its approach to silicon manufacturing with Meteor Lake CPUs, moving from a monolithic approach to a disaggregated, tile-based design. However, the significant technology switch is clearly providing a headache or two; reviewers and power users can't stop discovering new performance issues affecting Chipzilla's latest Core Ultra processors. The Arrow Lake CPUs, which Intel introduced on October 24, 2024, under the Core Ultra Series 2 brand, proved to be slower than Raptor Lake processors (Core i9-14900K). They are also much slower than the 9800X3D, which is why AMD sales are soaring right now. But wait, there's more: Intel Core Ultra 200 CPUs are even slower when it comes to driving the fastest SSD units available on the market. The SSD Review discovered the issue while testing PCIe 5.0 SSDs. These drives should theoretically be able to reach a 14GB/s data rate, but the actual benchmark results were falling short of that target. The storage-focused website experienced the problem with the Samsung 9100 Pro and Micron 4600 SSDs, pairing the two drives with both high-end Raptor Lake (Z790) and Arrow Lake-compatible motherboards (Z890). The Z790 board was able to achieve speeds of 14.3GB/s with both SSDs, while the same storage units weren't able to exceed 12.3GB/s when paired with Arrow Lake CPUs and motherboards. The reviewer also tested the drives through a PCIe add-in storage card (Asus Hyper M.2), discovering that the issue mostly affects the bandwidth available through the CPU's PCIe lanes. The expansion card provided higher sequential I/O rates, while random-performance figures were still lacking compared to Z790 motherboards. The issue isn't limited to specific motherboard brands. Asus and ASRock confirmed and replicated the performance downgrade in their labs, and they also explained why the issue is actually happening: Core Ultra 200 CPUs experience higher latency to the I/O tile that feeds the processors' Gen5 PCIe lanes. // Related Stories Intel also confirmed The SSD Review's discovery. The company said that PCIe lanes 21 to 24 feeding the Gen5 port "may" exhibit increased latency compared to PCIe lanes 1 to 16 because the Arrow Lake design uses a longer die-to-die data path. Intel has tried to improve gaming performance on its chiplet-style CPUs with a few firmware (microcode) updates. But we don't see how the Santa Clara corporation will be able to fix the newly discovered issue with fast storage drives without a significant readjustment of the CPU design.