Intel on Tuesday launched its “Meteor Lake” processors, which will be available in computers by the end of the year. The new Intel Core Ultra chips are built using the company’s 7-nanometer “Intel 4” technology and are Intel’s first processors to feature a dedicated neural processing unit (NPU) to improve on-device artificial intelligence performance. Like rivals AMD and Qualcomm, Intel’s upcoming chips use dielets, which are blocks of different components on the same chip. Intel also claims its chips can run generative artificial intelligence tools more efficiently on laptops.
Intel’s upcoming Meteor Lake processors will launch on December 14 and will succeed the company’s Raptor Lake CPUs released last year. The chipmaker says Meteor Lake represents the biggest architectural shift in the company’s processor design in four decades, with the top-end chips being called Intel Core Ultra – Intel appears to have given its high-end chips a new name. Terminal PC chip.
Intel says the new Meteor Lake processors will use less power and provide better performance because Intel uses smaller die. This suggests that Meteor Lake CPUs may actually be aimed at laptop users. “Compute Tile” has a performance and efficiency core that is said to provide better battery efficiency, as well as the company’s first integrated NPU AI engine.
The processor also has dedicated blocks for media and graphics, which are connected independently to the SoC. They can also be turned on and off independently, according to Intel. The “graphics” block on the processor is an “Xe LPG” GPU, equipped with 8 Xe cores and providing support for ray tracing and XeSS – Intel’s technology “upgrade” content.
Connectivity options on the “I/O Tile” Meteor Lake processor 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. Intel has launched the first chip to support the recently announced Thunderbolt 5 standard.
Intel also touts the ability of its Meteor Lake “Intel Core Ultra” chips to use the built-in NPU to run artificial intelligence tasks. The chips are expected to be able to run generative artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT on a computer without sending data to a cloud service. The dedicated NPU should also provide higher performance when using artificial intelligence features that are expected to appear in Windows in the future.
Pricing for Intel’s Meteor Lake processors hasn’t been announced yet, but we expect to hear more about these processors closer to the December 14 launch date, including which OEMs will be the first to bring the new chips to consumers and whether they will On laptops and desktops.
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