Meet Intel Core Ultra, The Company’s Most Advanced Processor To Date
Meet Intel Core Ultra, The Company’s Most Advanced Processor To Date
Today Intel is launching its latest and greatest processor to come out of Team Blue – the Core Ultra 100 series. Codenamed ‘Meteor Lake’, the Core Ultra family of chips has been leaked, teased, and talked about for a long while and today through its ‘AI Everywhere’ event, the chips are now officially leading the charge of AI PCs.
There’s a lot to unpack here, starting with the all-new packaging technology called ‘Foveros’. This 3D packaging technology fuses multiple tiles into one singular chip – which includes compute tile (CPU cores), graphics tile (Arc iGPU), SoC tile (LPE core + uncore), and I/O tile. Also for the first time, the chip will feature multiple process technologies from Intel and TSMC, including Intel 4, TSMC N5, and TSMC N6.
The memory support gets an upgrade as well. Meteor Lake chips will support up to 64GB of LPDDR5/LPDDR5X-7467 RAM, or 96GB of DDR5-5600; meanwhile, there are no signs of Thunderbolt 5 despite its recent announcement by the company. Wi-Fi 7 is optional – depending on whether the OEM is willing to implement it in their systems (you should see them first in high-end models). Still, Wi-Fi 6E is plenty new for today, so you’re not missing too much today, at the very least.
The new family brings new P-core and E-core architecture: Redwood Cove (P-core) and Crestmont (E-core). For Redwood Cove, Intel says it improved the power efficiency and branch prediction, which nets a small performance uplift over the outgoing Raptor Lake chips. Crestmont meanwhile gets a bigger boost thanks to increased instructions-per-clock (IPC), as well as improvements in VNNI instructions designed for AI workloads.
Intel’s first-party figures pit the Core Ultra 7 165H to the predecessor, the Intel Core i7-1370P, and the competitors – AMD Ryzen 7 7840U and ARM-powered Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 SoC. Interestingly, the single-core performance of Core Ultra falls behind its predecessor, but just about managed to lead the AMD chip by 12%. Meanwhile, the multi-core performance gave similar uplifts for the Core Ultra chip, netting an 11% lead.
Meteor Lake also introduces a new class of cores – LPE-cores (Low power E-cores). All chips on the Core Ultra family launching today come with a pair of these LPE-cores, which are reserved for low-power workloads such as video playback. Intel says this nets a 25% power reduction in Netflix video playback compared to its predecessor, and up to 48% less power compared to AMD’s Zen4-powered Ryzen 7 7840U. Even more impressive is the idle power consumption, which Intel says it consumes just one-fifth of AMD’s equivalents.
Another highlight of Meteor Lake is the all-new integrated GPU, now based on the Xe-LPG architecture instead of the outgoing Xe-LP architecture. With Xe-LPG’s lineage coming from Arc A-Series’s Xe-HPG architecture, there are a bunch of new features and performance boosts that gave these onboard graphics a significant upgrade. So much so, Intel is touting up to 2x more performance compared to the outgoing model in Baldur’s Gate 3, but your mileage may vary – as demonstrated in this chart provided by Intel.
And here comes the question: how does it fare against AMD’s much more mature onboard GPU technologies? Intel says the Core Ultra may achieve 5% more performance compared to AMD’s equivalents (which runs the Radeon 780M) on average in 1080p Medium settings. These Xe-LPG chips also feature the XeSS upscaling tech, functionally similar to AMD’s FSR2 upscaling technology – and they believe this can either boost performance or save power, depending on your priorities.
With the imminent wave of ‘AI PCs’ hitting the market next year, it’s important to mention the chip’s AI capabilities as well. The company says its chips can deliver up to 34 TOPS – but that number can be pretty hard to wrap around today given that measuring AI performance isn’t quite as cut-and-dry as your usual CPU and GPU tests. Still, Intel promises to invest heavily in this segment to help commercialize AI experiences on PCs.
Intel also talked about the new Intel Evo Edition standard, which consists of many specific metrics – such as <1.5s instant wake-up, Core Ultra 5, 7, 9 CPUs, ≥8GB dual-channel RAM, ≥256GB PCIe SSD, USB-C fast charging, FHD or greater resolution displays, Wi-Fi 6E, Thunderbolt 4, <15/20mm chassis thickness for iGPU and dGPU designs respectively, 10+ hours battery life, to name a few.
Today Intel is launching 8 SKUs – 4 under the H-series and 4 under the U-series, with 3 more arriving in Q1 2024. Some things worth pointing out: the H-series chips run on 28W PBP (processor base power), not the 45W of old, which meant this series is effectively the old P-series in disguise. However, there’s one exception – the Core Ultra 9 185H will come with 45W PBP, but will max out at 115W for burst multi-core workloads. Meanwhile, the U-series will come in two flavors, with the 15W (1x5U) and 9W (1x4U) variants.
Expect laptop announcements to arrive at this minute onwards with these Core Ultra chips – as the laptop launch season approaches.
Pokdepinion: A lot to take in this time around – the CPU competition should be pretty interesting.
