According to PC Gamer the firm lobbed out a fresh set of advisories, revealing vulnerabilities affecting its shiny Core Ultra CPUs, its Arc graphics cards and the Endurance Gaming Mode software that's supposed to make laptops more efficient. Instead, it might be helping hackers dig in.
Core Ultra 5, 7 and 9 chips have a flaw in the branch prediction unit that could allow local attackers to yank private data from your machine. Chipzilla has fixed this with a microcode update, assuming your system builder bothers to pass it on.
Then there’s another hole in Intel’s Integrated Connectivity I/O (CNVi), which could be used for privilege escalation. Again, mitigated with microcode.
But the real eyebrow-raiser is the GPU bug, which Intel labels with a big red “HIGH” severity. It affects all integrated graphics from 7th Gen onwards and includes the newer discrete Arc units like the B580. Intel’s graphics drivers could allow attackers to seize control, crash your machine or siphon off sensitive data. A patched driver is available.
Intel’s Endurance Gaming Mode software also made the naughty list. This energy-saving app, meant to optimise battery life by capping frame rates, could actually let attackers escalate privileges on affected laptops.
A fix is already out in version 1.5.651.0 of the software, though users will need the latest GPU driver. So yes, you’ll want to patch everything, everywhere, all at once.
This follows months of instability hell for Chipzilla’s 13th and 14th Gen Raptor Lake processors, which are still being patched a year on. This isn't the Arrow Lake launch you were waiting for, those chips still need serious tuning just to boot properly.