The newest chips from Intel -- officially called The Intel Core Ultra family -- offer more than just a speed bump. Meteor Lake is built with Foveros 3D packaging technology, a radical new packaging technology that's Intel's largest architectural shift in 40 years, And Meteor Lake marks not only a fundamental rethinking of Intel’s processor design, but also its approach to fabricating its processors – these are the company’s first mainstream chips to use silicon from a competing fab.
Intel leans on TSMC’s process node tech for three of the four active tiles on the processor, selecting two less expensive TSMC nodes for some functions, and one higher-density and higher-performance TSMC node than its own ‘Intel 4’ node that it uses for its CPU tile.
▶ Architecture: The Core Ultra, Detailed
▶ GPU: Double the Graphics Performance Per Watt
▶ VPU: AI acceleration for PCs demoed
▶ Next gen: Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake
With Meteor Lake, Intel has baked AI directly into the chip through a neural processing unit (NPU), a dedicated AI engine that’s designed specifically to run sustained AI inference workloads. Paired with a forthcoming version of Windows supporting deep AI integration, expected summer of 2024, Meteor Lake could herald the beginning of the AI PC age, computers that can tap into AI to simplify our computing experience and make laptops and desktops exponentially more powerful.
These are needed changes as Intel looks to regain the lead over its primary fab competitor, TSMC, in process node tech, and outmaneuver its primary chip competitor, AMD, with its new chiplet-based architecture. Intel also has to fend off Apple, which has now made a disruptive entrance into the laptop market with faster, more power efficient processors. Will Intel succeed? Will the AI PC take off? Tom's Hardware is your guide to this pivotal new innovation.
You'll find Meteor Lake in:
Samsung Galaxy Book 4 | Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon, IdeaPad Pro 5i | Alienware m16 R2 | Asus ZenBook 14, ROG Zephyrus G14 | HP Spectre x360 14 | MSI Prestige 16 AI | Acer Swift Go 14 | Dell XPS 14 & 16
