Intel on Tuesday unveiled its ‘Meteor Lake’ processors that will appear on computers by the end of the year. Built using the company’s 7nm “Intel 4” technology, the new Intel Core Ultra chips are Intel’s first processors to feature a dedicated neural processing unit (NPU) for enhanced on-device AI performance. Like rivals AMD and Qualcomm, Intel’s upcoming chips use chiplets – or tiles for different components on the same chip. Intel has also touted its chip’s ability to run generative AI tools more efficiently on a laptop.
Intel’s upcoming Meteor Lake processors, launching on December 14, will follow the company’s Raptor Lake CPUs announced last year. The chipmaker says Meteor Lake represents the biggest architectural shift in the company’s processor design in four decades, and that its very best chip is called the Intel Core Ultra. Intel seems to have switched to a new name because of its high performance. end of PC chip.
Thanks to Intel’s use of chiplets, the new Meteor Lake processors will consume less power and deliver better performance, according to Intel. This suggests that the Meteor Lake CPUs are actually aimed at laptop users. The “Compute Tile” has performance and efficiency cores that are claimed to offer much better battery efficiency, as well as the company’s first integrated NPU AI engine.
The processor also has dedicated media and graphics tiles, which are linked independently to the SoC. They can also be turned on and off independently of each other, according to Intel. The ‘Graphics’ tile on the processor is an ‘Xe LPG’ GPU that packs 8 Xe cores and supports ray tracing and XeSS – Intel’s content upscaling technology.
Connectivity options on the “I/O Tile” Meteor Lake processors include Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4, native HDMI 2.1, DisplayPort 2.1, PCIe Gen 5, and Thunderbolt 4. It looks like customers will have to wait a few more months before they Intel introduces the first chips with support for the recently announced Thunderbolt 5 standard.
Intel has also touted the ability of its Meteor Lake ‘Intel Core Ultra’ chips to perform AI tasks using the built-in NPU. The chips are expected to be able to run generative AI tools, similar to ChatGPT, on their computers without sending data to a cloud service. The dedicated NPU should also provide better performance when using AI features that are expected to make their way to Windows in the future.
Pricing for Intel’s Meteor Lake processors hasn’t been announced yet, but we can expect to hear more about these processors closer to the December 14 launch date, including which OEMs will be the first to offer the new chips to consumers and whether they will appear in the future. both laptops and desktop computers.
