Users testing Intel’s latest BIOS patch noticed a 6.5 per cent drop in the Core i9-13900 K’s single-core performance in Cinebench R15. In Cinebench R23, the Core i9-14900K dropped about two per cent of its multi-core performance score, putting it behind the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X.

While this may seem bad, Digital Trends notes it is much milder than previous performance drops ranging from 9 to 20 per cent – or the whole meltdown experience. Intel has clearly learned from its first round of motherboard updates and is gradually mitigating the issue to far more acceptable levels.

According to an Intel blog update, the final issue with the 13th and 14th-gen processors has been discovered, which the current BIOS update addresses. “Microcode and BIOS code requesting elevated core voltages which can cause Vmin shift, especially during idle or light activity periods.”

However, ‘mitigated impact’ is not ‘no impact,’ and the latter is what Intel seemed to promise when it reported on the patch’s internal test results. Two percent and 6.5 percent performance differences are typically well within the allowable margin for system variances.

Fortunately for Intel, Arrow Lake is a whole new architecture, and these current issues should not affect the new chips.