Intel's performance-enhancing IPO program debuts in gaming PCs across China — overclocked performance with full warranty

News
By published

IPO is Intel's way of balancing manual overclocking and reference settings with warranty protection.

Press image of Intel Core Series 200S processor on a dramatic blue and black background
(Image credit: Intel)

Arrow Lake might have some fuel left in the tank, as Intel's latest IPO (Intel Performance Optimizations) tech is reportedly hitting pre-builts in China, per UNIKO's Hardware at X.

Intel recently unveiled the IPO program in China. It is supposedly a suite of tuned settings or profiles that balance overclocking and stock settings. It is important to note that Intel has not detailed or announced an IPO for the global market. In addition, for the time being, it appears these profiles are aimed at system integrators and OEMs, not individual customers.

Enthusiast and gamers can use many techniques to get the most out of their CPU. This includes manual CPU overclocking when you exceed your CPU's rated specifications, followed by XMP/EXPO for RAM. AMD offers a PBO that auto-tunes your CPU to extract maximum performance with minimal manual intervention. The catch is that all these utilities can technically void your warranty if things go south.

IPO is designed to serve as a middle ground between stock profiles and overclocking, with proper warranty coverage. These profiles promise a stable experience, eliminating the need for constant adjustments and the fear of crashing as seen with manual overclocking. IPO targets the CPU (P-cores, E-cores, Ring-bus, NGU, D2D interconnects, PL1 and PL2) and the RAM (Transfer speeds and timings).

In an example profile shared by UNIKO's Hardware, a pre-built from Maxsun with IPO lands a sweet 200 MHz uplift in core clock speeds while pushing RAM speeds to DDR5-8400 from DDR5-8000, resulting in a purported 10% FPS increase (on the pre-built's marketing material).

That's not all. Another leaker claims that Intel will offer "opt-in" BIOS presets to its Arrow Lake chips in the future, a premise similar to IPO. Maybe IPO serves as a pilot program for this feature. The exact specifics have not been detailed. This might make Arrow Lake a compelling choice against Ryzen offerings, particularly for system integrators.

Despite the substantial buildup to Arrow Lake, performance on launch day was subpar, with these chips failing to beat even their last-generation counterparts in some scenarios. Arrow Lake's MCM (Multi Chip Module) design eats away a chunk of the performance, with the memory controller designated to a separate tile, incurring unwanted latency penalties. Another aspect was the slower ring-bus clock speeds, almost 20% slower than Raptor Lake.

Additional firmware/software-related issues pushed Intel to release several fixes by December. The final update, microcode version 0x114 and CSME firmware kit 19.0.0.1854v2.2, launched in January, but our testing proved contrary to Intel's claimed performance improvements. IPO is Intel's latest attempt to wring every last bit of performance from Arrow Lake, but we are still light on details regarding availability.

See more CPUs News
Hassam Nasir
Hassam Nasir
Contributing Writer

Hassam Nasir is a die-hard hardware enthusiast with years of experience as a tech editor and writer, focusing on detailed CPU comparisons and general hardware news. When he’s not working, you’ll find him bending tubes for his ever-evolving custom water-loop gaming rig or benchmarking the latest CPUs and GPUs just for fun.

20 Comments Comment from the forums
  • bit_user
    Presumably, these CPUs will be sold at a premium. If all Arrow Lake CPUs were capable of those speeds, they'd just ship that way. Therefore, the IPO-capable models seem like they must be binned.
    Reply
  • thestryker
    bit_user said:
    If all Arrow Lake CPUs were capable of those speeds, they'd just ship that way.
    Yes and no.

    As I've been slowly making my way through how ARL OC works I can say the disclosed settings here are pretty mild. The ring OC for ARL is extremely hit and miss, but this is only +100Mhz which should work across the board. The D2D/NGU going to a 31x is also just going to work as what impacts stability here is DRAM speed with low latency. The E-cores OC pretty consistently to 4.9/5Ghz without much trouble. The P-core OC seems like it should be turbo ratio based so that shouldn't particularly be problematic either as limited clock scaling and all core tend to be the issues here. I do wonder if Intel has a method for picking which cores clock best that they aren't sharing though because this is much more important with ARL than RPL.

    Overall these are very safe OC figures, but I wouldn't be surprised if the CPUs now have RPL efficiency (note the 280/350 PL1/PL2) to ensure they work across the board. It's not a tradeoff I would make, but a lot of people don't really seem to care much about CPU efficiency if it goes faster.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    thestryker said:
    The D2D/NGP going to a 31x is also just going to work as what impacts stability here is DRAM speed with low latency.
    From what I saw, they're increasing the die-to-die speed from 2.1 GHz to 3.1 GHz, which sounds like a lot.
    Reply
  • thestryker
    bit_user said:
    From what I saw, they're increasing the die-to-die speed from 2.1 GHz to 3.1 GHz, which sounds like a lot.
    It does sound like a lot, but the only instability issues with high D2D clocks I've seen are with high speed memory (over 8000) with tight timings (under 9.5ns). My 265K runs 32x for both D2D and NGU without touching voltages with DDR5-7200 CL34 with tweaked subtimings so it matches lower capacity kits. This is also one of the things Splave mentioned in the ARL OC article he did for Tom's.
    Reply
  • Pierce2623
    Why on Earth are they overclocking the cores instead of the various interconnect settings. I guarantee there’s much more performance in optimizing the interconnect settings than there is in a 200MHz clock speed bump. 200MHz isn’t much with the click speeds CPUs are doing these days. I don’t personally own Arrow Lake but everyone that does says the performance gains are in the interconnect speeds rather than core clocks.
    Reply
  • thestryker
    Pierce2623 said:
    Why on Earth are they overclocking the cores instead of the various interconnect settings. I guarantee there’s much more performance in optimizing the interconnect settings than there is in a 200MHz clock speed bump. 200MHz isn’t much with the click speeds CPUs are doing these days. I don’t personally own Arrow Lake but everyone that does says the performance gains are in the interconnect speeds rather than core clocks.
    If you look at the source you'd see they're tweaking D2D, NGU and Ring clocks as well as CPU/DRAM.

    It's also mentioned in the article:
    IPO targets the CPU (P-cores, E-cores, Ring-bus, NGU, D2D interconnects, PL1 and PL2) and the RAM (Transfer speeds and timings).
    Reply
  • TerryLaze
    thestryker said:
    I do wonder if Intel has a method for picking which cores clock best that they aren't sharing though because this is much more important with ARL than RPL.
    https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000021587/processors.htmlI don't think they changed this, they would have released a statement.
    From what I remember reading they check which cores need the lowest amount of voltage and power and use those since those will have the highest headroom.
    Intel® Turbo Boost Max Technology 3.0 Technology identifies the best performing core(s) on a processor and provides increased performance on those cores through increasing frequency as needed by taking advantage of power and thermal headroom.

    Due to production differences, processor cores vary in maximum potential frequency. Intel® Turbo Boost Max Technology 3.0 identifies up to two of the fastest cores on your CPU, known as “favored cores”. Then it applies a frequency boost to those cores (or that core) and directs critical workloads to them.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    Pierce2623 said:
    Why on Earth are they overclocking the cores instead of the various interconnect settings. I guarantee there’s much more performance in optimizing the interconnect settings than there is in a 200MHz clock speed bump. 200MHz isn’t much with the click speeds CPUs are doing these days.
    They're not mutually-exclusive. Not everything is totally bottlenecked on L3 cache or memory, in which cases a core bump will indeed increase performance. Keep in mind the P-Core limit is 3.8% faster and E-Core limit is 6.5% faster. These are on par with the difference between Raptor Lake (Gen 13) and its refresh (Gen 14), which probably stands as a good example of what's feasible without silicon-level changes.

    As for interconnect, I already pointed out that they said the die-to-die interconnect was boosted from 2.1 to 3.1 GHz, which seems massive to me. Like, it's hard for me to believe they even had so much headroom.

    Uncore also got a substantial boost. From what I'm reading, that should affect communication with the memory controller. However, Skatterbencher's experiments with this showed very little impact on Y-cruncher scores.

    Here's the list of claimed improvements.
    Limit
    New
    Original
    Increase
    P-Core (GHz)
    5.4
    5.2
    3.8%
    E-Core (GHz)
    4.9
    4.6
    6.5%
    Ring (GHz)
    4.0
    3.9
    2.6%
    Uncore (GHz)
    3.1
    2.6
    19.2%
    Die-to-Die (GHz)
    3.1
    2.1
    47.6%
    PL1 (W)
    280
    125
    124.0%
    PL2 (W)
    350
    250
    40.0%

    While the PL1 increase seems massive, consider that most gamers were probably already doing 250 W (or unlimited Tau - same thing), in which case it's only a 12% increase.

    Source:1910389427584852324View: https://x.com/unikoshardware/status/1910389427584852324
    Reply
  • thestryker
    TerryLaze said:
    https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000021587/processors.htmlI don't think they changed this, they would have released a statement.
    From what I remember reading they check which cores need the lowest amount of voltage and power and use those since those will have the highest headroom.
    TB 3.0 only covers up to two core boost while Intel has turbo multipliers for every step. I suppose they could just be giving a +200Mhz boost to the stock settings which only cover 2 core and all core. It's just not what I think of when overclocking as the individual turbo optimization is right there.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    thestryker said:
    Intel has turbo multipliers for every step.
    Have you found a good place to look these up? I found a way to query it on Linux (and I'm sure Windows overclocking tools can do this, as well), but that only helps if you're already running the CPU you want to know about.
    Reply