Intel's "Meteor Lake" mobile processor family launched last December, with an initial selection comprised of eleven "Core Ultra" SKUs. This week, internet sleuths have stumbled on some new additions—Team Blue has seemingly rolled out new models without much fanfare. Benchleaks discovered an intriguing Geekbench Browser entry that detailed a "Google Rex" Android device specced with an Intel Core Ultra 5 115U CPU. The benchmark database displays two errors—namely the incorrect detection of 10 cores and 10 threads. Team Blue's official product page lists 8 cores and 10 threads—specifically a configuration housing two P-Cores, four E-Cores, and two LP-Cores.

Amusingly, the official datasheet specifies that the Core Ultra 5 115U launched alongside the debut batch of Meteor Lake parts. VideoCardz posits that the chip's weaker iGPU specs separate it from the rest of the pack: "its designation as 'Ultra' might be misleading. In reality, even its graphics have been scaled down to 3 Xe-Cores, making it the sole SKU in the entire lineup with fewer than 4 Xe-Cores. The NPU is still intact and seems to be working at the same speed as the most powerful Meteor Lake chip. This suggests that the 115U could potentially excel as an AI accelerator, prioritizing AI tasks over other functions." This entry-level SKU is not fully out in the wild, but the existence of test platforms (via Geekbench Browser entries) semi-proves that Team Blue and its hardware partners are readying new portable products.

Microsoft, Intel, and AMD are attempting to jumpstart demand in the PC industry again, under the aegis of the AI PC—devices with native acceleration for AI workloads. Both Intel and AMD have mobile processors with on-silicon NPUs (neural processing units), which are designed to accelerate the first wave of AI-enhanced client experiences on Windows 11 23H2. Microsoft's bulwark with democratizing AI has been Copilot, as a licensee of Open AI GPT-4, GPT-4 Turbo, Dali, and other generative AI tools from the Open AI stable. Copilot is currently Microsoft's most heavily invested application, with its most capital and best minds mobilized to making it the most popular AI assistant. Microsoft even pushed for the AI PC designator to PC OEMs, which requires them to have a dedicated Copilot key akin to the Start key (we'll see how anti-competition regulators deal with that).

The problem with Microsoft's tango with Intel and AMD to push AI PCs, is that Copilot doesn't really use an NPU, not even at the edge—you input a query or a prompt, and Copilot hands it over to a cloud-based AI service. This is about to change, with Microsoft announcing that Copilot will be able to run locally on AI PCs. Microsoft identified several kinds of Copilot use-cases that an NPU can handle on-device, which should speed up response times to Copilot queries, but this requires the NPU to have at least 40 TOPS of performance. This is a problem for the current crop of processors with NPUs. Intel's Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" has an AI Boost NPU with 10 TOPS on tap, while the Ryzen 8040 "Hawk Point" is only slightly faster, with a 16 TOPS Ryzen AI NPU. AMD has already revealed that the XDNA 2-based 2nd Generation Ryzen AI NPU in its upcoming "Strix Point" processors will come with over 40 TOPS of performance, and it stands to reason that the NPUs in Intel's "Arrow Lake" or "Lunar Lake" processors are comparable in performance; which should enable on-device Copilot.

MSI's new handheld gaming PC—Claw—has (so far) experienced a scattershot global launch and review program. Initial impressions from embargo-busting Chinese evaluators indicated that the Intel Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" APU-based devices struggled to keep up with 2023's lineup of AMD-powered handhelds—namely the ASUS ROG Ally and Lenovo Legion Go. YouTube tech channel, Retro Tech Dad, has acquired two MSI Claw SKUs for testing purposes—the more expensive model sports an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H processor, while the basic variant makes do with a Core Ultra 5 135H. The plucky new-ish competitors—updated with freshly-released drivers—were pitched against both ASUS ROG Ally variants (Ryzen Z1 Extreme and Z1 vanilla), but the main takeaway from Retro Tech Dad's testing activities is the higher-end Claw's apparent inability to outpace its weaker sibling.

Once again, we see these Intel "Meteor Lake" mobile chips falling behind AMD's popular Ryzen Z1 Extreme APU—the standard Ryzen Z1 seems to be a closer rival. VideoCardz has analyzed Retro Tech Dad's initial findings—these figures: "suggests that the Core Ultra 5 135H performs better than the Core Ultra 7 155H in low-TDP settings. However, overall, both APUs provide nearly identical performance." It is worth watching Retro Tech Dad's full video coverage—he posits that Intel's silicon is capable of trading blows with equivalent AMD parts, but current drivers could be holding back this unrealized potential. The cheapest Claw SKU seems to be the de facto choice (for Team Blue enthusiasts), given its demonstrated ability to keep up with higher-priced options within MSI's handheld family.

Intel Core Ultra "Lunar Lake-MX" will be the company's bulwark against Apple's M-series Pro and Max chips, designed to power the next crop of performance ultraportables. The MX codename extension denotes MoP (memory-on-package), which sees stacked LPDDR5X memory chips share the package's fiberglass substrate with the chip, to conserve PCB footprint, and give Intel greater control over the right kind of memory speed, timings, and power-management features suited to its microarchitecture. This is essentially what Apple does with its M-series SoCs powering its MacBooks and iPad Pros. Igor's Lab scored the motherlode on the way Intel has restructured the various components across its chiplets, and the various I/O wired to the package.

When compared to "Meteor Lake," the "Lunar Lake" microarchitecture sees a small amount of "re-aggregation" of the various logic-heavy components of the processor. On "Meteor Lake," the CPU cores and the iGPU sat on separate tiles—Compute tile and Graphics tile, respectively, with a large SoC tile sitting between them, and a smaller I/O tile that serves as an extension of the SoC tile. All four tiles sat on top of a Foveros base tile, which is essentially an interposer—a silicon die that facilitates high-density microscopic wiring between the various tiles that are placed on top of it. With "Lunar Lake," there are only two tiles—the Compute tile, and the SoC tile.

An intriguing offshoot of Intel's Meteor Lake generation of processors has been discovered by hardware sleuth momomo_us—an iBase MI1002 motherboard specification sheet contains references to a 14th Gen Core Ultra (Meteor Lake-PS) family, with a next-gen LGA1851 socket listed as the desktop platform. The industrial iBase Mini-ITX workstation board is "coming soon" according to a promotional image—this could signal a revival of Meteor Lake outside of laptop platforms. 2023 was a bit of a rollercoaster year for MTL-S SKUs (on socket LGA1851)—one moment Team Blue confirmed that it was happening, then a couple of days later it was disposed of. The upcoming Arrow Lake processor generation seems to be the logical taker of this mantle, but the (leaked) existence of Meteor Lake-PS throws a proverbial spanner into the works.

iBase's MTL-PS-ready boards will be niche "industrial/embedded" items—according to Tom's Hardware: "Intel hasn't officially revealed Meteor Lake PS, but given the "PS" designation, these upcoming processors target the IoT market, similar to Alder Lake PS. Therefore, it's safe to assume that Intel is bringing the mobile Meteor Lake processors to the LGA1851 socket...Although the motherboard has (this) socket, no chipset is present because Meteor Lake PS is the spitting image of the Meteor Lake chip and doesn't need a PCH." Team Blue is hyping up Arrow Lake (ARL-S) as its next-gen mainstream desktop platform, with a launch window set for later in 2024—by sharp contrast, Meteor Lake PS parts are highly unlikely to receive much fanfare upon release.

Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite is about to make landfall in the ultraportable notebook segment, powering a new wave of Windows 11 devices powered by Arm, capable of running even legacy Windows applications. The Snapdragon X Elite SoC in particular has been designed to rival the Apple M3 chip powering the 2024 MacBook Air, and some of the "entry-level" variants of the 2023 MacBook Pros. These chips threaten the 15 W U-segment and even 28 W P-segment of x86-64 processors from Intel, such as the Core Ultra "Meteor Lake," and Ryzen 8040 "Hawk Point." Erdi Özüağ, prominent tech journalist from Türkiye, has access to a Qualcomm-reference notebook powered by the Snapdragon X Elite X1E80100 28 W SoC. He compared its performance to an off-the-shelf notebook powered by a 28 W Intel Core Ultra 7 155H "Meteor Lake" processor.

There are three tests that highlight the performance of the key components of the SoCs—CPU, iGPU, and NPU. A Microsoft Visual Studio code compile test sees the Snapdragon X Elite with its 12-core Oryon CPU finish the test in 37 seconds; compared to 54 seconds by the Core Ultra 7 155H with its 6P+8E+2LP CPU. In the 3DMark test, the Adreno 750 iGPU posts identical performance numbers to the Arc Graphics Xe-LPG of the 155H. Where the Snapdragon X Elite dominates the Intel chip is AI inferencing. The UL Procyon test sees the 45 TOPS NPU of the Snapdragon X Elite score 1720 points compared to 476 points by the 10 TOPS AI Boost NPU of the Core Ultra. The Intel machine is using OpenVINO, while the Snapdragon is using Qualcomm SNPE SDK for the test. Don't forget to check out the video review by Erdi Özüağ in the source link below.

There is some confidence behind removing HTT (Hyper-Threading technology) for the P-cores of its upcoming processor generations. Apparently "Lunar Lake" 17 W U-segment processors offer a substantial multithreaded performance gain of almost 50% over the current-generation "Meteor Lake," enabling Intel to do away with the power- or cache overheads that come with HTT. "Lunar Lake" will be Intel's third microarchitecture powering mobile processors under the Core Ultra brand; and its U-segment SKUs meant for ultraportables will come with processor base power values of 17 W. Intel will probably revise its platform specifications for the U-segment to denote 17 W, up from the current 15 W. Bionic Squash, a reliable source with Intel leaks, suggests so. The processors will come with a configurable base power of up to 30 W.

Intel "Lunar Lake" microarchitecture has a lot in common with the upcoming "Arrow Lake." For starters, both microarchitectures use the same combination of "Lion Cove" P-core architecture, and "Skymont" E-core architecture; however "Lunar Lake" comes with changes in the core-configuration, and the use of more advanced foundry nodes for some of its tiles. "Lunar Lake," much like "Meteor Lake," comes with a design priority for mobile platforms, which is why Intel is planning to launch this shortly after "Arrow Lake," with some reports even speaking of a late-2024 debut for the U-segment.

Over the weekend, there have been a series of leaks from sources such as Golden Pig Upgrade, and High Yield YT, surrounding Intel's next-generation desktop processor, the Core Ultra 2-series "Arrow Lake-S." The lineup is likely to continue the new client processor naming scheme Intel introduced with the Core Ultra 1-series "Meteor Lake" on the mobile platform. "Arrow Lake-S" is rumored to debut the new Socket LGA1851, which retains cooler-compatibility with LGA1700. Although Intel has nucleated all I/O functions of the traditional PCH to "Meteor Lake," making it a single-chip solution on the mobile platform; and although the mobile "Arrow Lake" will continue to be single-chip; the desktop "Arrow Lake-S" will be a 2-chip solution. This is mainly because the desktop platform demands a lot more PCIe lanes, for a larger number of NVMe storage devices, or high bandwidth devices such as Thunderbolt and USB4 hubs, etc.

Another key finding in this latest series of leaks, is that unlike "Meteor Lake," the desktop "Arrow Lake-S" will do away with low-power island E-cores located in the SoC tile of the processor. All CPU cores are located in the Compute tile, which is expected to be built in the Intel 20A foundry node—the company's first node to implement GAAFETs (nanosheets), with backside power delivery; as well as an advanced 2nd generation EUV lithography. Intel's 1st Gen EUV is used on the current FinFET-based Intel 4 and Intel 3 foundry nodes.

MSI Claw A1M, the company's ambitious attempt at a handheld gaming console based on the Intel Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" processor, instead of AMD Ryzen Z1 "Zen 4," goes on sale from March 8, 2024. This is according to a now-retracted Newegg store listing that mentions the release dates of the three Claw A1M models. The lineup is led by the Claw A1M powered by a Core Ultra 155H processor, 16 GB of LPDDR5-6400 memory, and 1 TB of NVMe SSD storage; for $799. For $50 less at $749, you get the same device, but with 512 GB of NVMe SSD storage. For a further $100 less, at $699, you get a model with the Core Ultra 5 135H processor, but the same 16 GB LPDDR5 memory, and 512 GB SSD, as the $749 model.

All three models feature a physically identical body design, including the controller layout, and lighting. Performance between the Core Ultra 7 155H and Core Ultra 5 135H models, is bound to differ. The 155H has a 6P+8E+2LP CPU core configuration, but more importantly, maxes out the Graphics Tile, with all 8 Xe cores being enabled (1,024 unified shaders). The Core Ultra 5 135H has a 4P+8E+2LP CPU core config, while its iGPU has 7 Xe cores. The star attraction with this console is its 7-inch touchscreen with 1080p resolution at 120 Hz refresh rate. Comms on all three models include Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4.

Intel has been hyping up their artificial intelligence-augmented processor products since late last year—their "AI Everywhere" marketing push started with the official launch of Intel Core Ultra mobile CPUs, AKA the much-delayed Meteor Lake processor family. CEO, Pat Gelsinger stated (mid-December 2023): "AI innovation is poised to raise the digital economy's impact up to as much as one-third of global gross domestic product...Intel is developing the technologies and solutions that empower customers to seamlessly integrate and effectively run AI in all their applications—in the cloud and, increasingly, locally at the PC and edge, where data is generated and used." Team Blue's presence at this week's MWC Barcelona 2024 event introduced "AI Everywhere Across Network, Edge, Enterprise."

Nikkei Asia sat down with Intel's David Feng—Vice President of Client Computing Group and General Manager of Client Segments. The impressively job-titled executive discussed the "future of AI PCs," and set some lofty sales goals for his firm. According to the Nikkei report, Intel leadership expects to "deliver 40 million AI PCs" this year and a further 60 million units next year—representing "more than 20% of the projected total global PC market in 2025." Feng and his colleagues predict that mainstream customers will prefer to use local "on-device" AI solutions (equipped with NPUs), rather than rely on remote cloud services. Significant Edge AI improvements are expected to arrive with next generation Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake processor families, the latter will be bringing Team Blue NPU technologies to desktop platforms—AMD's Ryzen 8000G series of AM5 APUs launched with XDNA engines last month.

Intel today launched Core Ultra vPro line of mobile processors for commercial notebooks. These chips are based on the "Meteor Lake" silicon, but come with the exhaustive vPro Enterprise or vPro Essentials set of features that let large organizations manage notebooks and other devices they hand out to their personnel. The processor models themselves align with the regular Core Ultra chips the company launched in December for the consumer notebook segment; but with the added vPro brand extension. Notebooks with Core Ultra vPro processors will be available in the commercial notebook channels open to large organizations ordering from OEMs to their exact specs in large enough volumes.

Among the vPro Enterprise features are the popular Intel Active Management tech, which allows remote administration of devices; Remote Platform Erase; Unique Platform ID, Service Record, and platform features such as VT-D, System Resources Defence, total memory encryption, Threat Detection Technology, CFET, and a hardware-based firmware authentication mechanism. All current Core Ultra 5, Core Ultra 7, and Core Ultra 9 processor models have vPro variants, with identical clock speeds, core-configurations, cache sizes, and performance levels to their consumer notebook siblings.

MSI could be staggering the launch of its Intel Core Ultra-powered Claw gaming handheld, depending on regional availability—VideoCardz has observed contradictory release date data through UK retail channels. A confusing scenario is presented with some listings mentioning March 20, although others outline various dates going into April. MSI's German e-store appears to be the first outlet to have Claw units "in stock," although the active listing indicates that orders will start shipping on March 5. The pre-orderable "Handheld CLAW A1M-036" seems to be the most basic out of MSI's three launch SKUs—€849 (~$921) bags you a model that sports Intel's Core Ultra 5 135H APU and 512 GB of storage.

Preview samples are out in the wild—YouTube reviewers and influencers have started to show off their pre-release units, but Western embargoes are still in effect at the time of writing. Fairly comprehensive comparison videos emerged just over two weeks ago—courtesy of the "Please, Xiao Fengfeng" Bilibili video channel. The MSI Claw (Ultra 7-155H version) was compared to a close handheld rival; an ASUS ROG Ally (Ryzen Z1 Extreme). Overall, the AMD APU-based Ally seemed to outperform MSI's plucky new entrant—it is possible that the latter was disadvantaged with immature chipset drivers. Intel and its hardware partners are attempting to catch up with Team Red's more widespread release of portable-oriented APU packages—another Meteor Lake-based handheld gaming system, Tulpar, was demoed at a recent Intel Extreme Masters event.

Toward the end of 2024, Intel will update its client processor product stack with the introduction of the new "Arrow Lake" microarchitecture targeting both the desktop and mobile segments. On the desktop side of things, this will herald the new Socket LGA1851 with more SoC connectivity being shifted to the processor; and on the mobile side of things, there will be a much-needed increase in CPU core counts form the current 6P+8E+2LP. This low maximum core-count for "Meteor Lake" is the reason why Intel couldn't debut it on the desktop platform, and couldn't use it to power enthusiast HX-segment mobile processors, either—it had to tap into "Raptor Lake Refresh," and use the older 14th Gen Core nomenclature one last time.

All hopes are now pinned on "Arrow Lake," which could make up Intel's second Core Ultra mobile lineup; its first desktop Core Ultra, and possibly push "Meteor Lake" to the non-Ultra tier. "Arrow Lake" carries forward the Xe-LPG graphics architecture for the iGPU that Intel debuted with "Meteor Lake," but there's a key difference between the desktop- and mobile "Arrow Lake" chips concerning this iGPU, and it has not just to do with the Xe core counts. It turns out, that while the desktop "Arrow Lake-S" processor comes with an iGPU based on the Xe-LPG graphics architecture; the mobile "Arrow Lake" chips spanning the U-, P-, and H-segments will use a newer version of this architecture, called the Xe-LPG+.

Phoronix has spotted intriguing new Linux kernel patches for Intel Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" processors—the Monday morning notes reveal in-house software engineers are implementing default power profile adjustments. Meteor Lake CPUs have been operating on a default "balanced_performance" mode since their December 2023 launch—Linux adjustments will affect the processor's Energy Performance Preference (EPP) under Linux (similar to Windows Power Plans). Michael Larabel (Phoronix head honcho) laid out some history: "We've seen EPP overrides/tuning in the past within the Intel P-State driver for prior generations of Intel processors and this is much the same here. The ACPI EPP value is typically a range from 0 to 255 for indicating the processor/system power to performance preference."

He continued onto present day circumstances: "To date though the Intel P-State EPP override/tuning has been focused on the default "balanced_performance" mode while the first patch (from Monday) allows for model-specific EPP overrides for all pre-defined EPP strings. The second patch then goes ahead and updates the EPP values for Meteor Lake so that the balanced_performance default is now treated as 115 rather than 128 and the "performance" EPP is set to 16 rather than 0." Larabel is hopeful that a public release will coincide with the "upcoming Linux v6.9 cycle." Intel software engineers reckon that their tweaks/overrides have produced higher performance results—for "small form factor devices"—while reducing CPU temperatures and thermal throttling. Meteor Lake is considered to be quite energy inefficient when compared to the closest mobile processor architectures from AMD and Apple. Team Blue's next-gen Arrow Lake family is expected to launch later this year, but the current crop of CPUs require a bit of TLC and optimization in the meantime.

AMD's first generation XDNA-based Neural Processing Unit (NPU) arrived last year, as an onboard aspect of their "Phoenix" Ryzen 7040 mobile processor series, followed many months later by Intel's similarly NPU-laden Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" generation. It was recently revealed that a Windows 11 DirectML preview grants preliminary support for Core Ultra NPUs—Microsoft's software engineering department seems to be prioritizing Intel AI tech. Team Red has already released XDNA on desktop platforms—with its Ryzen 8000G APU family—and the "Hawk Point" 8040 series is nearing a retail launch, but these processors (plus 7040) remain unsupported by Microsoft's DirectML API. An interesting AMD community blog entry was posted two weeks—news outlets have been slow to pick up on its relevance.

Intel NPU activity can be monitored in Windows Task Manager (see screenshot below), and an upcoming update will add competing AMD parts to the mix. Joel Hruska's Team Red community blog post reveals that NPU monitoring for Ryzen 8040 series processors is due soon: " As AI PCs become more popular, there's a growing need for system monitoring tools that can track the performance of the new NPUs (Neural Processing Units) available on select Ryzen 8040 Series mobile processors. A neural processing unit - also sometimes referred to an integrated or on-die AI engine -- can improve battery life by offloading AI tasks that would otherwise be performed on the CPU or GPU. AMD has been working with Microsoft to enable MCDM (Microsoft Compute Driver Model) infrastructure on the AMD NPU (Neural Processing Unit)-enabled Ryzen 8040 Series of mobile processors. MCDM is a derivative of Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) that is targeting non-GPU, compute devices, such as the NPU. MCDM enables NPUs to make use of the existing GPU device management infrastructure, including scheduling, power management, memory management, and performance debugging with tools such as the Task Manager. MCDM serves as a fundamental layer, ensuring the smooth execution of AI workloads on NPU devices."

Chinese review outlets have received MSI Claw sample units—the "Please, Xiao Fengfeng" Bilibili video channel has produced several comparison pieces detailing how the plucky Intel Meteor Lake-powered handheld stands up against its closest rival; ASUS ROG Ally. The latter utilizes an AMD Ryzen Z1 APU—in Extreme or Standard forms—many news outlets have pointed out that the Z1 Extreme processor is a slightly reworked Ryzen 7 7840U "Phoenix" processor. Intel and its handheld hardware partners have not dressed up Meteor Lake chips with alternative gaming monikers—simply put, the MSI Claw arrives with Core Ultra 7-155H or Ultra 5-135H processors onboard. The two rival systems both run on Window 11, and also share the same screen size, resolution, display technology (IPS) and 16 GB LPDDR5-6400 memory configuration. The almost eight months old ASUS handheld seems to outperform its near-launch competition.

Xiao Fengfeng's review (Ultra 7-155H versus Z1 Extreme) focuses on different power levels and how they affect handheld performance—the Claw and Ally have user selectable TDP modes. A VideoCardz analysis piece lays out key divergences: "Both companies offer easy TDP profile switches, allowing users to adjust performance based on the game's requirements or available battery life. The Claw's larger battery could theoretically offer more gaming time or higher TDP with the same battery life. The system can work at 40 W TDP level (but in reality it's between 35 and 40 watts)...In the Shadow of the Tomb Raider test, the Claw doesn't seem to outperform the ROG Ally. According to a Bilibili creator's test, the system falls short at four different power levels: 15 W, 20 W, 25 W, and max TDP (40 W for Claw and 30 W for Ally)."

According to a Bloomberg report, Intel is seeking to raise at least $2 billion in equity funding from investors for expanding its fabrication facility in Leixlip, Ireland, known as Fab 34. The chipmaker has hired an advisor to find potential investors interested in providing capital for the project. Fab 34 is currently Intel's only chip plant in Europe that uses cutting-edge extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography. It produces processors on the Intel 4 process node, including compute tiles for Meteor Lake client CPUs and expected future Xeon data center chips. While $2 billion alone cannot finance the construction of an entirely new fab today, it can support meaningful expansion or upgrades of existing capacity. Intel likely aims to grow Fab 34's output and/or transition it to more advanced 3 nm-class technologies like Intel 3, Intel 20A, or Intel 18A.

Expanding production aligns with Intel's needs for its own products and its Intel Foundry Services business, providing contract manufacturing. Intel previously secured a $15 billion investment from Brookfield Infrastructure for its Arizona fabs in exchange for a 49% stake, demonstrating the company's willingness to partner to raise capital for manufacturing projects. The Brookfield deal also set a precedent of using outside financing to supplement Intel's own spending budget. It provided $15 billion in effectively free cash flow Intel can redirect to other priorities like new fabs without increasing debt. Intel's latest fundraising efforts for the Ireland site follow a similar equity investment model that leverages outside capital to support its manufacturing expansion plans. Acquiring High-NA EUV machinery for manufacturing is costly, as these machines can reach up to $380 million alone.

An Open Image Denoise 2.2 release candidate was released earlier today—as discovered by Phoronix's founder and principal writer; Michael Larabel. Intel's dedicated website has not been updated with any new documentation or changelogs (at the time of writing), but a GitHub release page shows all of the crucial information. Team Blue's open-source oneAPI has been kept up-to-date with the latest technologies—not only limited to Intel's stable of Xe-LP, Xe-HPG and Xe-HPC components—the Phonorix article highlights updated support on competing platforms. The v2.2 preview adds support for Meteor Lake's integrated Arc graphics solution, and additional "denoising quality enhancements and other improvements."

Non-Intel platform improvements include updates for Apple's M-series chipsets, AArch64 processors, and NVIDIA CUDA. OIDn 2.2-rc: "adds Metal device support for Apple Silicon GPUs on recent versions of macOS. OIDn has already been supporting ARM64/AArch64 for Apple Silicon CPUs while now Open Image Denoise has extended that AArch64 support to work on Windows and Linux too. There is better performance in general for Open Image Denoise on CPUs with this forthcoming release." The changelog also highlights a general improvement performance across processors, and a fix that resolves a crash incident: "when releasing a buffer after releasing the device."

DFI, the world's leading brand in embedded motherboards and industrial computers, is targeting the AI application market by launching the embedded system module (SOM) MTH968 equipped with the latest Intel Core Ultra processor. It is the first product integrated with an NPU (Neural Processor Unit) processor, representing the official integration of AI with industrial PCs (IPCs). With the expansion into AI IPC, DFI expects to inject new momentum into the AI edge computing market.

According to the STL Partners report, the potential market value of global edge computing will increase from US$9 billion in 2020 to US$462 billion in 2030, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 49%. Therefore, the development of products that utilize the core capabilities of chips to rapidly execute AI edge computing in devices has become a key focus for many major technology companies.

Pat Gelsinger, CEO of Intel Corporation, has outlined future performance expectations for the company's Core range of processors. In a recent fourth quarter 2023 earnings call he declared: "The Core Ultra platform delivers leadership AI performance today with our next-generation platforms launching later this year, Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake tripling our AI performance. In 2025 with Panther Lake, we will grow AI performance up to an additional 2x." Team Blue's Intel Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" mobile processors arrived right at the tail end of last year, as a somewhat delayed answer to AMD's Ryzen 7040 "Phoenix" APU series—both leveraging their own AI-crunching NPU technologies. Gelsinger believes that the launch of Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake Core product lines will bring significant (3x) AI processing improvements over Meteor Lake. He seemed to confident in a delay-free release schedule for the new year and beyond: "We are first in the industry to have incorporated both gate-all-around and backside power delivery in a single process node, the latter unexpected two years ahead of our competition. Arrow Lake, our lead Intel 20A vehicle will launch this year."

He proceeded to gush about their next node advancement: "Intel 18A is expected to achieve manufacturing readiness in second half 2024, completing our five nodes in four year journey and bringing us back to process leadership. I am pleased to say that Clearwater Forest, our first Intel 18A part for servers has already gone into fab and Panther Lake for clients will be heading into Fab shortly." Industry experts posit that Core "Panther Lake" parts could borrow elements from the next generation Xeon "Clearwater Forest" efficiency-focused family—possibly the latter's "Darkmont" E-cores, to accompany "Cougar Cove" P-cores. The Intel CEO is quite excited about the manufacturing outlay for 2025: "I'll just say, hey, we look at this every single day and we're scrutinizing carefully our progress on 18A. And obviously the great news that we just described those Clearwater Forest taping out, that gives us a lot of confidence that 18A is healthy. That's a major product for us. Panther Lake following that shortly."

Yesterday's CPU-Z update—now version 2.09—brings support for unreleased next generation Intel and AMD processors. PC hardware sleuths have combed through the freeware app's mid-January changelog—we first see "improved support" for Intel's recently launched 14th Generation Meteor Lake mobile CPU series, while the same line also mentions "preliminary support" for Team Blue's Arrow Lake desktop processor family. The latter is hotly anticipated to launch at the tail-end of 2024, so it is intriguing to see CPU-Z's development team getting familiar with Intel's mainstream 15th gen microarchitecture.

The main competition also makes an appearance further down—AMD's "Hawk Point and Hawk Point 2 (Zen 4/Zen 4c)" CPU families are present, although the changelog does not clarify whether this is preliminary support (or full blown). "Hawk Point" seems to be a very light refresh of their proceeding "Phoenix" product line, with some extra NPU "oomph" sprinkled in. The rumor mill has Team Red's Ryzen 8040 Series of mobile parts marked down for a first quarter 2024 launch. Version 2.09 also adds support for NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER (AD104-350-A1) GPUs. We expect to see the higher-up models joining in on the fun, with upcoming CPU-Z updates.

During the CES 2024 show, the ASUS booth had a wide variety of products on display. Among the more interesting solutions was the highly-anticipated ROG NUC. Initially, Intel sold the NUC design and manufacturing license to ASUS, and we were left wondering how ASUS would adapt its compact design. We had a booth tour and took pictures of the new design in person. The ASUS ROG NUC can be configured with Intel's flagship Meteor Lake-H Core Ultra 9 185H processor, a 16-core/22-thread CPU with a 115 W maximum turbo TDP that boosts up to 5.1 GHz. It features six performance cores, eight efficiency cores, and two low-power performance cores. The system can be equipped with up to an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Laptop GPU for graphics.

A more affordable option pairs the Core Ultra 7 155H processor with an RTX 4060 Laptop GPU. Other key specifications include support for up to 32 GB of DDR5 memory across two SO-DIMM slots, three M.2 PCIe Gen 4 x4 SSD slots, Intel Killer WiFi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3, 2.5G LAN, Thunderbolt 4, as much as six USB ports, HDMI and DisplayPort outputs, and a choice of Windows 11 Home 64-bit, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, or no pre-installed OS. The 2.5-liter chassis shows that miniature size can equal big performance and can easily provide great gaming and productivity results.

Intel in its 2024 International CES presentation, unveiled its two new upcoming client microarchitectures, "Arrow Lake" and "Lunar Lake." Michelle Johnston Holthaus, EVP and GM of Intel's client computing group (CCG), in her keynote address, held up a next-generation Core Ultra "Lunar Lake" chip. This is the Lunar Lake-MX package, with MOP (memory on package). You have a Foveros base tile resembling "Meteor Lake," with on-package LPDDR5x memory stacks. With "Lunar Lake," Intel is reorganizing components across its various Foveros tiles—the Compute and Graphics tiles are combined into a single tile built on an Intel foundry node that's possibly the Intel 20A (we have no confirmation); and a smaller SoC tile that has all of the components of the current "Meteor Lake" SoC tile, and is possibly built on a TSMC node, such as N3.

"Lunar Lake" will pick up the mantle from "Meteor Lake" in the U-segment and H-segment (that's ultraportables, and thin-and-light), when it comes out later this year (we predict in the second half of 2024), with Core Ultra 2-series branding. Intel also referenced "Arrow Lake," which could finally bring light to the sluggish pace of development in its desktop segment. When it comes out later this year, "Arrow Lake" will debut Socket LGA1851, "Arrow Lake" will bring the AI Boost NPU to the desktop, along with Arc Xe-LPG integrated graphics. The biggest upgrade of course will be its new Compute tile, with its "Lion Cove" P-cores, and "Skymont" E-cores, that possibly offer a large IPC uplift over the current combination of "Raptor Cove" and "Gracemont" cores on the "Raptor Lake" silicon. It's also possible that Intel will try to bring "Meteor Lake" with its 6P+8E Compute tile, Xe-LPG iGPU, and NPU, to the LGA1851 socket, as part of some mid-range processor models. 2024 will see a Intel desktop processor based on a new architecture, which is the big takeaway here.

Intel Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" mobile processor may be the the company's most efficient, but isn't a generation ahead of the 13th Gen Core "Raptor Lake" mobile processors in terms of performance. This isn't just because it has an overall lower CPU core count in its H-segment of SKUs, but also because its performance cores (P-cores) actually post a generational reduction in IPC, as David Huang in his blog testing contemporary mobile processors found out, through a series of single-threaded benchmarks. Huang did a SPECint 2017 performance comparison of Intel's Core Ultra 7 155H, and Core i7-13700H "Raptor Lake," with AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS, 7840H "Phoenix, Zen 4," and Apple M3 Pro and M2 Pro.

In his testing, the 155H, an H-segment processor, was found roughly matching the "Zen 4" based 7840U and 7840HS; while the Core i7-13700H was ahead of the three. Apple's M2 Pro and M3 Pro are a league ahead of all the other chips in terms of IPC. To determine IPC, Huang tested all processors with only one core, and their default clock speeds, and divided SPECint 2017 scores upon average clock speed of the loaded core logged during the course of the benchmark. Its worth noting here that the i7-13000H notebook was using dual-channel (4 sub-channel) DDR5 memory, while the Core Ultra 7 155H notebook was using LPDDR5, however Huang remarks that this shouldn't affect his conclusion that there has been an IPC regression between "Raptor Lake" and "Meteor Lake."

UltrabookReview, which recently took the ASUS Zenbook 14 OLED UX3405 for a spin, noticed something interesting with the Intel Core Ultra 155H "Meteor Lake" processor powering it—apparently Intel is still working with its device partners to improve performance and efficiency, and a UEFI firmware update (BIOS update) from ASUS improves the processor's performance/Watt. The reviewer compares the notebook with its original BIOS version 201, to the updated version 203, and notices improvements in performance/Watt at 28 W. The firmware apparently updates the notebook's power management. The improvements are most apparent with Cinebench R23, where the best-run score with the original 201 firmware was 12357 points, and the updated 203 firmware was 13873 points (a 12.25% improvement). You can catch the review in the source link below.