At the tail end of 2023, Intel launched its Meteor Lake laptop chips, the first Intel CPUs to ship with a “chiplet” architecture that includes a discrete NPU (Neural Processing Unit). These are the first chips to bear the new Intel Core Ultra branding, and you're likely to see them powering some of the best laptops of the year.
These new Intel Core Ultra chips are a big deal because the NPU is designed to excel at the kind of calculations required to perform the tasks we typically call “AI” these days — blurring your background on video calls, generating images from text and that sort of thing. Apple’s MacBooks have had dedicated NPUs built into them ever since the debut of the MacBook Air M1, when they started shipping with Apple silicon inside, and now many of the best Windows laptops of 2024 are likely to have them as well.
Intel and PC vendors seem eager to sell you on these new “AI laptops” packing Meteor Lake chips, and we’ve seen ads for them hitting our inboxes and cropping up on retailers like Newegg all year. But now that we’ve tested a few of the first Meteor Lake laptops to hit the market, I have to say I’m a little underwhelmed.
