Well the single thread performance is underwhelming too. But if Redtech is correct, the cock speed regression on Arrow Lake is massive, so this could explain most of the poor performance. What I think Intel is doing is finally ending it's insane focus on winning benchmarks and running their CPUs at stupid clock frequencies and hence stupid power levels. Meteor lake and Arrow Lake are focusing on efficiency. So Arrow Lake is relying more on architectural improvements that brute force for performance. This means it will use a lot less power at similar performance levels to Raptor Lake. This will be especially important for mobile. Even AMD is regressing clock speeds for Zen 5, just not as much.
The lackluster performance could be attributed to the absence of hyperthreading. This technology is rumored to get a revamp with the introduction of rentable unit cores as part of the 2026 architectural overhaul brought by Nova Lake.