Intel’s latest generation of its Meteor Lake mobile chip architecture has been trundling down the road for so long that the announcement of the actual chips has been somewhat anticlimactic — especially since it doesn’t offer much reason for most consumers to use AI. (The goal is still selling it to software makers.)
My colleague Stephen Shankland and I have already covered the new low-power E-core, which is intended to run light sustained workloads (think video streaming) without hitting the battery as much as the regular old E-cores. We understand why this AI push is so important to Intel’s business. We know how Intel rebranded the Meteor Lake chips as Core Ultra. The chips are made using the company’s latest Intel 4 process. And Intel is last to the announcement party; AMD and Qualcomm have already planted their flags.
While the new chips have a small, two-core neural processing unit, or NPU, for AI acceleration, Intel’s AI Boost uses the CPU and GPU as well, depending upon the type of workload: The CPU is used when speed is needed and the GPU for help with generative AI workloads.
Read more: AI Helps Chipmakers Design the Very Processors That Speed Up AI
That’s why you’ll hear Intel and AMD talk about AI performance metrics — TOPS, sometimes referred to as TeraOPS, or trillion operations per second — for the combined system rather than just the NPU. For the Ultra 7 165H chip, you get roughly up to 34 TOPS with 11 TOPS for the NPU, 18 TOPS for the GPU and the rest for the CPU.
In comparison, AMD says its XDNA in the new Ryzen 8040 series performs at 39 TOPS, attributing 16 TOPS to the NPU and the remainder to the CPU and GPU. So even though NPUs are getting big buzz, they actually only carry a small part of the AI workload in these chips.
But these numbers also only paint a part of the performance picture for AI because there’s no “typical” AI workload, and at the moment, no consistent methods of implementing it — there’s still a lot of shakin’ going on in the software.
The Ultra chips inside
Today’s chips will be shipping in a lot of laptops by the end of the month, with preorders starting today. Their specs and positioning will make way for a different class of chip and laptop announcements at CES.
The usual cavalcade of companies are on board, so be ready for new and refreshed laptops from Intel’s partners, including the Acer Swift Go 14 (starting at $800 with a Core Ultra 5 and up to an Ultra 7) and the Predator Triton Neo 16 gaming laptop (with up to a Core Ultra 9 and GeForce RTX 4070, starting at $1,500). The top end of each line of the Ultra 9, Ultra 7 and Ultra 5 will ship a little later: Laptops with those chips should be available around March.
