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Intel has lifted the curtain on its latest mobile CPUs, codenamed Meteor Lake, officially called Core Ultra. The new CPUs are designed for laptops and are years in the making, featuring significantly improved power efficiency and overall computing performance with a bunch of AI computing baked in.
Intel says its new CPUs are the company’s most power-efficient CPUs ever. Built on Intel’s 4 process technology and utilizing a new tiled architecture with a combination of core types to divide up the tasks. P-cores (or performance cores) handle any high-performance tasks like gaming. E-cores (efficiency cores) take care of any tasks that are more tedious and don’t require a lot of computing power.
By splitting up these tasks like this, battery life on laptops is “stretched by hours.” Any improvement Intel can help deliver when it comes to battery life should be welcomed. Considering the most recent generations before the Meteor Lake family didn’t exactly shine in this area. The entire makeup equals 16 cores and 22 threads with six of those cores being P-Cores and 8 of them being E-Cores. The remaining two cores are low-power E-Cores to help boost the power efficiency. The new chips also feature a new, more powerful GPU.
Intel Core Ultra CPUs have built-in Arc GPUs for enhanced performance
Better power efficiency is great but Intel didn’t stop there with these chips. They also feature a built-in Intel Arc GPU for better performance while gaming. Intel says that these new chips can deliver 2x the performance per watt compared to 13th Gen Intel Core i7 CPUs when gaming resolution is set at 1080p.
There’s also support for DirectX 12 Ultimate, hardware-accelerated ray-tracing, HDMI 2.1, and DisplayPort 2.1 20G.
An all-new Neural Processing Unit paves the way for AI computing
The addition of the NPU seems to be more about setting things up for future computing. Rather than what you’ll be able to do right now. As ExtremeTech points out, Intel does little more than show off a few benchmarks for apps like Stable Diffusion and DaVinci Resolve. However, the company doesn’t go in-depth on how the NPU will benefit the majority of consumers.
That being said, Intel is seemingly getting a jumpstart here. It’s paving the way now so it’s prepared for when “AI PCs” are more mainstream.
Intel already has plenty of partners implementing the new chips
We’re bound to hear about more of these leading into CES. Some manufacturing partners are already announcing products though. Earlier this morning Samsung announced the Galaxy Book 4 powered by the Intel Core Ultra 9 and Intel Core Ultra 7 chips. Lenovo also announced the IdeaPad Pro 5i featuring an Intel Core Ultra 9. These are both mainly intended for ultra-thin portable computing for work or general use. But there are gaming laptops with Intel’s new chips on the horizon as well. Acer this morning announced its first gaming laptop powered by Intel’s Core Ultra CPUs. The Predator Triton Neo 16.
Consumers should expect more gaming laptops with Intel’s new chips to pop up in the coming weeks.