Intel Core Ultra Meteor Lake Processors Launched with AI Boost NPU and Arc GPU for Ultra Thin Notebooks

2023/12/15 JeGX

Intel has launched yesterday its new family of processors based on the Meteor Lake architecture, essentially designed for ultra thin PCs (notebooks).

On Dec. 14, 2023, Intel launched its Intel® Core™ Ultra mobile processors and ushered in the first generation of the AI PC. With dedicated AI acceleration capability across the central processing unit, graphics processing unit and neural processing unit architectures, Intel Core Ultra is Intel’s most AI-capable and power-efficient client processor.

The AI PC represents a new generation of personal computers for anyone who learns, streams, games or creates on the go, while taking full advantage of AI capabilities across operating systems and applications.

Intel Core Ultra is the first processor built on Intel 4 process technology and the first to use Foveros 3D advance packaging technology. Its new Performance-core architecture brings improved instructions per cycle and its new Efficient-cores and low-power Efficient-cores (LP E-cores) provide scalable, multi-threaded performance and more efficient modern multitasking.

With this new architecture, Intel gives up monolithic processors and moves to chiplet-based processors (like AMD…). There are four chiplets or tiles:
– the CPU tile (4nm)
– integrated GPU tile (5nm)
– SoC tile (6nm): the SoC includes various controllers (memory, NPU, Ethernet, Audio, etc.).
– I/O tile (6nm)

All tiles are interconnected using Intel’s Foveros 3D packaging technology.

Specifications

H-series:
– Core Ultra 9 185H
– Core Ultra 7 165H
– Core Ultra 7 155H
– Core Ultra 5 135H
– Core Ultra 5 125H

U-series:
– Core Ultra 7 165U
– Core Ultra 7 155U
– Core Ultra 5 135U
– Core Ultra 5 125U

AI Everywhere with three AI engines
Meteor Lake comes with a processing unit dedicated to neural computing tasks (AI). But this NPU (Neural Processing Unit, also called AI Boost by Intel) is built to handle longer-running AI workloads at low power. But it is not alone to execute AI workloads: the CPU and GPU are also there depending on the kind of AI task to execute:

Arc GPU
Meteor Lake processors embark a GPU based on the Arc architecture. But watch out, not all processors have an Arc GPU: only H-series enjoys the Arc graphics hardware:
– Core Ultra 9 185H (8 Xe cores)
– Core Ultra 7 165H (8 Xe cores)
– Core Ultra 7 155H (8 Xe cores)
– Core Ultra 5 135H (7 Xe cores)
– Core Ultra 5 125H (7 Xe cores)

The Arc GPU is available with 8 or 7 Xe cores. For the sake of comparison, an Arc A750 GPU has 28 Xe cores (or 3584 ALUs) and and Arc A380 has 8 Xe cores (or 1024 ALUs). Then the Arc GPU of the Core Ultra 9 / 7 is equivalent to the Arc A380.

Core Ultra Processors Family

Links:

Intel Core Ultra Processors Explained in 60 Seconds