Intel has just unveiled its Meteor Lake chips, and it’s a small revolution. With unprecedented energy efficiency on PC, an upgraded graphics section and modules dedicated to AI, Core Ultra processors pose formidable competitors against Apple and AMD.
Intel Core processors had lost some of their luster in recent years, particularly in the face of Apple’s M chips and their impressive energy efficiency, and AMD’s Ryzen with their formidable integrated graphics circuits. However, the situation could change completely with the arrival of Core Ultra, the brand new generation of Intel processors based on the Meteor Lake architecture.
Announced last September and officially unveiled on December 14, 2023, during a conference with a strange tone to say the least, the Core Ultra range of processors, intended for laptops, marks a radical evolution in the design of Intel’s chips and brings significant advances in three areas: energy efficiency, graphics power and artificial intelligence.
Good news, these are not simple announcements for the future, but a reality that is already palpable, because several models of laptops equipped with these new chips are now available, and the first Tests carried out seem to confirm that Intel has kept all of its promises.
Intel Core Ultra: impressive energy efficiency
Energy efficiency has become a central subject for processor manufacturers, especially since the irruption of Apple in this sector, with its M chips offering a crazy level of autonomy to its MacBooks, very far from what we could find the best in the world of Windows laptops. To reduce the gap, Intel has therefore carried out a radical transformation of the architecture of its processors, the “most important in 40 years” in its own words. The new Core Ultra therefore adopts the Meteor Lake architecture, an arrangement of components in tiles (tile) which is close to that of the ARM chips found in smartphones, but without abandoning the historic x86_64 architecture.
In this organization, the calculation units are grouped within tiles, each of which is specialized and optimized for a type of tasks and operations. The different tiles are assembled and linked together via a new method called Foveros, which promises gains in energy performance of around 20%. All of these components are manufactured via a new process called Intel 4 which, as its name does not indicate, corresponds to an engraving fineness of 7 nanometers, compared to 10 previously, and would offer a density of transistors per mm² equivalent to those of the 3 and 5 nanometer processes of TSMC and Samsung, according to Intel.
In addition to this complete rearrangement of components, the Meteor Lake architecture extends a concept introduced on the penultimate generation (Alder Lake) of Intel processors, namely the mixing of different types of cores within the chip. The Ultra Cores will therefore include so-called Efficient cores (P-Core), responsible for the most demanding calculations, Efficient cores (E-Core) for less demanding operations, and finally brand new Efficient-Low Consumption cores (E- LP Core), to take care of the most common tasks. The distribution of workloads between the three types of cores is managed by the Threads Director, a component acting as a switcher whose mission is to allocate tasks optimally, and whose operation has been further improved on this. generation.
In fact, it is therefore the low consumption E-LP cores which work most of the time, and which only pass the baton to the Efficient and High Performance cores when necessary. This mode of operation allows a drastic reduction in energy consumption in most uses, which is added to that already offered by the new architecture. For example, Intel indicates that playing a Netflix video uses 25% less energy with a Core Ultra 7 165H than with a Core i7-1370P… and this promise seems completely confirmed by our test of the Asus Zenbook 14 OLED UX3405, an ultraportable which has a Core Ultra 7 155H and which lasted 16 hours of video playback, compared to 10 to 12 hours maximum on an equivalent model equipped with a previous generation processor. This result is particularly exciting and brings the autonomy of the Core Ultra closer to that found on Apple MacBooks.
Intel Core Ultra: an integrated graphics section finally up to par
In another area, it was this time against AMD that Intel fell behind. The manufacturer of Ryzen processors had in fact surprised everyone in 2022 by unveiling its Radeon 680M, integrated graphics processing units (iGPU) directly in the processor, and which offered a level of gaming performance never before seen with this type of processor. component. It is also largely on the success of processors equipped with the Radeon 680M, then its successor the 780M, that the rise of portable consoles like the Steam Deck and the ROG Ally is based. For its part, Intel did have iGPU technology with its Irix Xe chips, but they showed performance clearly below AMD’s Radeons.
But as with energy efficiency, this all seems about to change. For its Core Ultra, Intel has profoundly modified the graphics part integrated into its processors, replacing the aging Iris Xe cores with cores from these Intel Arc graphics cards for desktop PCs and called Xe-LPG. The company claims that this new graphics architecture would offer performance doubled for the same level of electrical power, i.e. a level of performance per watt also doubled. This new generation iGPU would allow Intel to return to the level of AMD’s Radeons and even surpass them in certain cases. We will obviously have to wait to test gaming machines with Core Ultra to verify these statements in a real situation, but the prospect of even soon launching portable consoles equipped with the Intel solution, with perhaps a jump in terms of autonomy, is in itself already very interesting.
The new features regarding the graphics capabilities of the Core Ultra do not stop there, since the integration of the Intel Arc architecture in the iGPUs provides management of DirectX12 Ultimate, hardware support for encoding and decoding of the ‘AV1 (the latest codec about to establish itself on most video streaming services), the possibility of connecting up to 4 screens and, above all, the arrival of the scaling solution (upscaling) from Intel, called XeSS.
The technologies ofupscaling are the new sinews of war in the video game sector, because they make it possible to drastically improve performance in the most demanding titles, by lowering the native definition in which the images are calculated before scaling them to the definition of the screen, by a process based on artificial intelligence techniques. In the desktop PC market, Nvidia clearly dominates the game with its DLSS, and in the portable console market, AMD has established itself with its Radeon Super Resolution (RSR). Once again, the arrival of Intel and its XeSS could therefore shake up some well-established players and offer great prospects to gamers, especially since the performance gains announced by the manufacturer do not seem anecdotal.
Please note, however, that not all Core Ultra processors will benefit from the Intel Arc GPU graphics part, only models with a number ending in the letter H will have it. Furthermore, the computer embedding these chips must have 16 GB of dual-channel memory for the Intel Arc iGPU to work. If you are considering purchasing a laptop with a Core Ultra to specifically benefit from the graphics part, pay attention to the name of the processor model and the characteristics of the RAM.
Intel Core Ultra: AI modules ready for the future
Artificial intelligence was at the heart of the Intel conference, from its title (AI Everywhere) to the expression “AI PC” that the speakers kept repeating throughout the presentation. Like AMD with its new Ryzen 8040 processors, Intel is placing particular emphasis on the new capabilities of its chips in terms of artificial intelligence. The manufacturer has integrated calculation units specialized in AI-related operations on the three main tiles of its processor. Thus the graphics tile will accelerate the rendering times of AI-based content generation tools, such as Stable Diffusion, and the CPU tile will provide increased responsiveness for AI tasks requiring very low latency like real-time translation. The SoC tile will contain a real Neural Processing Unit (NPU), a computing unit specifically designed to perform artificial intelligence operations with the best possible energy efficiency. This NPU will notably make it possible to offload the CPU and GPU of certain AI calculations in order to reduce energy consumption and further improve the autonomy of machines equipped with a Core Ultra processor.
Paradoxically, if the performance of Meteor Lake processors in terms of artificial intelligence occupied a preponderant place in the Intel conference, it is nevertheless the area which will have the least direct impact on users, at least in the immediate. Indeed, practical applications of artificial intelligence technologies are still rare for the general public, apart from a few superficial gadgets for videoconferencing. The most popular tools, such as ChatGPT and Midjourney, are currently programs that run on remote servers and are therefore not dependent on the user’s CPU performance. However, the current trend, or at least the one anticipated by Intel and other chipmakers, appears to be to gradually move the execution of programs relying on AI technologies from data centers to user machines (from the cloud to the edge, in marketers’ jargon). From this perspective, Intel is therefore getting ahead of the curve and preparing its processors to accommodate the future surge of artificial intelligence applications and other personal assistants, supposed to enchant our lives and relieve all our ills.
Intel Core Ultra: PCs equipped with the new chips already available
More prosaically, we can note with pleasure that Intel’s announcements are not just beautiful and vague promises, and that laptop manufacturers have already released several models equipped with Core Ultra processors. As mentioned in the introduction, Asus is now marketing the excellent Zenbook 14 OLED UX3405, which we tested and which delivers truly remarkable performance and autonomy for an ultraportable. For its part, Acer already offers a Swift Go also featuring a Core Ultra 7 155H, and other references will undoubtedly appear very soon from other major manufacturers, such as Lenovo, Dell or HP. A very good opportunity to equip yourself with a state-of-the-art laptop just before the end-of-year holidays, especially as the prices displayed on the first models available remain completely reasonable, especially compared to the “stars” from Apple.
One thing seems certain: Meteor Lake represents much more than a small marginal development for Intel, and it is rather a real generational leap that we should be talking about. The Core Ultra embody a whole new generation of processors focused on the future. And the rest promises to be exciting.