Arrow-Lake

TL;DR — A new Intel Core Ultra 9 285H (“ultra2”) joined my homelab this week. First Geekbench 6 run scored 1471 single / 12864 multi. That’s slower than the i7-12900K next to it on the rack. Six hours, two Talos upgrades, three diagnostic jobs, and one DaemonSet later, single-core jumped to 3090 (+110%). The villains: an outdated kernel, UKI silently ignoring extraKernelArgs, and a vendor BIOS that thinks PL2=75W is a reasonable default for a chip rated for 115W. Here’s how the diagnosis went. ...

There’s a moment in every homelab evolution where you stop and ask: what am I actually buying when I buy infrastructure? For me that moment came two weeks ago, staring at a renewal email from a SaaS I won’t name, doing back-of-the-envelope math on a Synology I almost ordered, and pricing out an EKS cluster for a side project that — let’s be honest — was never going to leave my apartment. ...