Intel Officially Launches Meteor Lake 'Core Ultra' CPUs

Today, Intel is hosting an "AI Everywhere" event to launch its Meteor Lake line of mobile CPUs. The new family of chips is a watershed moment for the company as it embarks on a new path forward, using tiles to comprise its CPUs instead of a monolithic design. It's also the first CPU on its new Intel 4 process (formerly 7nm), proving the company can jump to a new node without years of delays. It's launching eight new CPUs, with three more to come in 2024. They should be available in a wide variety of laptops by the time you read this.

Overall, Intel is launching both Core Ultra 7 and Core Ultra 5 CPUs today, with the word "Ultra" denoting Meteor Lake. As expected, these chips top out at six performance and eight efficiency cores, with two additional low-power cores in every SKU. That makes for a 16-core, 22-thread processor at the high end with a maximum boost clock of 5GHz. Meteor Lake is very focused on efficiency, so core counts are not something it's bragging about. As proof of this focus, every single Meteor Lake CPU includes eight efficiency cores and two low-power cores, so when it comes to core counts, only the number of P-cores is different between SKUs.

The Meteor Lake product stack is finally official. Note the bottom three SKUs are slated for 2024. Credit: Intel

At a high level, four Core Ultra 7/5 CPUs are being launched for its mainstream H-series, and four more CPUs are in its U-series, which are for ultra-thin laptops. The H-series chips are rated for 28W, while the U-series chips sip power at just 15W. Both product lines have Ultra 7 and Ultra 5 CPUs, so they are denoted by either H or U in their name to make it easy to understand which CPU goes where.

In addition to the above CPUs, Intel has three more chips up its sleeve for 2024: a flagship 45W Core ultra 9 CPU and two more 9W U-series chips. There will be no Core Ultra 3 version, as that'll likely be left to rebadged versions of its existing 13th/14th Gen chips.

The Core Ultra 9 is a weird CPU, as it's the only Meteor Lake part rated at 45W, compared with 28W for the rest of the H-series. It's called the Core Ultra 9 185H and has almost the same specs as the Core Ultra 7 165H, with the same number of cores, amount of cache, and iGPU configuration. However, it has a 100MHz higher boost clock on its P-cores and a 50MHz higher clock on the Xe GPU, making us wonder why Intel even bothered with this SKU. It won't even be available at launch, which is also a head-scratcher. It was previously reported this chip was delayed and is now confirmed.

Intel's goals: efficiency, AI at scale, and much improved GPU performance for thin-and-light notebooks. Credit: Intel

Otherwise, Intel is focusing heavily on three core advantages, pardon the pun, with Meteor Lake: efficiency, AI, and the performance of its integrated GPU. A lot of Intel's marketing is focused on gaming performance and the AI performance of its integrated Neural Processing Unit (NPU), indicating this is where Meteor Lake shows the most improvement over its predecessors and competitors.

For example, Intel says the Xe-based GPU in Meteor Lake is up to 2x faster than the iGPU in Raptor Lake at 28W, which is huge if true, and we see no reason why it won't be. The iGPU also supports Intel's upscaling technology, XeSS, which it says can deliver up to 39% higher frame rates, all on a thin-and-light laptop, which is notable. The iGPU in Meteor Lake also supports ray tracing, but have fun with that on a thin-and-light notebook.

These kind of charts don't always tell the whole story but it shows how much Intel is focused on performance-per-watt. Credit: Intel

For pure computer horsepower, Intel is not bragging about breaking benchmark records, as it's all relative to TDP, which for the H-series is 28W. Using that metric, Intel says its Core Ultra 7 165H CPU offers 11% more compute power than the equivalent AMD mobile chip, the 28W Ryzen 7 7840U. Intel also claims this CPU is more potent at 28W than Apple's new M3 silicon. Again, Intel is very focused on performance-per-watt with these chips, especially in very light notebooks, so expectations must be tempered with these factors in consideration.

The performance of the NPU is a bit more nebulous, as it seems Intel is promoting this hardware for what may come in the future when "AI PCs" are something we all understand. It has some benchmarks for applications like Stable Diffusion and DaVinci Resolve, showing it handily beating its 13th Gen chips and AMD's 7840U processor. However, it's unclear how the average consumer will benefit from actual AI applications in the future. AMD is leaning into this "AI is everywhere" angle, too, but it's yet to materialize for regular consumers. That could change in 2024.