During Intel’s « AI Everywhere » event in New York City this week, the company unveiled new Core Ultra CPUs for laptops and the 5th-gen Xeon CPU for servers.
Forward-looking: In an era where it’s clear that PCs still matter, Intel is making a statement about the future of the PC category with the much-anticipated launch of the Core Ultra chip (codenamed « Meteor Lake »). Not surprisingly, the direction is straight towards AI.
During Intel’s « AI Everywhere » event in New York City this week, the company unveiled new Core Ultra CPUs for laptops and the 5th-gen Xeon CPU for servers and data centers. Both offer enhanced AI capabilities, along with significant improvements in power efficiency and performance.
Core Ultra combines several new technologies into a single SoC – in fact, Intel claims it’s their biggest architectural leap in PC processors in about 40 years. The one change likely to get the most attention is the company’s first integration of an NPU, or Neural Processing Unit, into an SoC design.
The NPU is specifically tasked with accelerating certain types of AI workloads, freeing the CPU and GPU (also built into the chip) to do other tasks. In the process, it enables new types of applications to run on PCs and improves the laptop’s battery life and overall efficiency.
That’s a pretty heady combination, and Intel is using it to herald the dawn of the « AI PC » era – perfectly timed to tap into the huge focus on generative AI that’s swept over the tech industry and much of the world this past year.
Chief rival AMD actually had the first PC chip with a built-in NPU earlier in the year with the Ryzen 7040 and just unveiled the updated Ryzen 8040 with a second generation NPU last week.
However, given Intel’s massive position in PCs (as well as the limited software support for AMD’s initial NPU), there’s little doubt that the first Core Ultra-based PCs – which are available as of today – will be seen by many as the first in this burgeoning new category.
From a practical perspective, most people will appreciate the more traditional enhancements Intel has made to the chip – even though they may not be as sexy as the NPU. Core Ultra features the combination of up to 6 performance P Cores and 8 efficiency-focused E cores, but also includes two new ultra low-power cores they’re calling a low-power island that can kick in when system demands are low and extend battery life further.
