Intel Core Ultra 5 115U Spotted, Slowest Of The Pack With 2P+4E Cores
Intel Core Ultra 5 115U Spotted, Slowest Of The Pack With 2P+4E Cores
Since Intel rebranded its processors under the new Core Ultra naming scheme last December, the Meteor Lake processor lineup consists of a total of 11 SKUs. However, as spotted by Benchleaks on X (Twitter), there is a twelfth Core Ultra chip soon to enter the market – but it’s not a particularly fast one.
The new processor in question is the Intel Core Ultra 5 115U, which makes it the third U-series chip under the Core Ultra 5 classification, below the 135U and 125U. While both 135U and 125U are functionally similar with minor clock speed differences, the Core Ultra 5 115U is vastly different – it comes with 4 fewer E-cores and one less Xe-core over the existing Core Ultra U-series chips. This model is also listed on Intel’s ARK database as launched in Q4 2023, despite the model never being officially announced at the time.
This makes it effectively the slowest Core Ultra chip on paper, although intriguingly, it could end up being even slower than the Raptor Lake-powered Core 5 120U, which packs 2P+8E cores (although it lacks LPE-cores) and does not bear the Core Ultra naming. As Videocardz pointed out, the core count was incorrectly shown on Geekbench since the entry used Android 13 as its operating system, which is not designed around Intel’s LPE-core architectures.
As for why this chip exists and what kind of device it’s designed for, one can assume that this is meant to lower the entry barrier for the so-called ‘AI PCs’ (essentially, a PC that comes with onboard NPU). While the performance may not be up to the standard set by its more powerful counterparts, the AI feature set and capabilities should be the same – making it suitable for laptops designed with basic AI features in mind.
In any case, we should be able to see the chip entering the market in the near future, so expect new laptops to arrive with this low-end Meteor Lake processor powering them.
Pokdepinion: Maybe calling Core Ultra 5 isn’t exactly accurate. Why not ‘Core Ultra 3’?
