Intel’s new Core Ultra processors may just obviate the need for entry-level discrete GPUs.
You might have heard that Intel’s Core Ultra CPUs (codenamed Meteor Lake) are actually out and available now. That’s true; you can order a laptop with one right now, if you’d like. There are some reviews out around the web, but obviously we recommend waiting for our own coverage before you make any purchasing decisions. One thing we can tell you already, though: Meteor Lake’s integrated graphics are a huge step forward for Intel, and a real challenge to AMD.
You can check our coverage from Thursday if you’re interested, or hit our full deep dive if you really want the nitty-gritty. If you’re just slightly curious, we’ll explain it in short: Meteor Lake includes a powerful Arc Alchemist-derived GPU as its own tile on the CPU package. It sports 128 Xe cores, giving it fully 1024 shaders, and on the Core Ultra 7 165H that we have, it clocks up to 2.3 GHz.
That there is our MSI Prestige 16 AI Evo, a 16″ laptop sporting the aforementioned Core Ultra 7 CPU. The specific system that we have is a pre-production engineering sample and it does have its rough edges, including a keyboard that gets up to 130°F while gaming. We don’t have any complaints about the performance of the Meteor Lake processor itself, though.
