Today, Intel announced its newest line of x86 processors, the Intel Core Ultra 200V series, codenamed Lunar Lake. You can pre-order PCs running the processor starting today, and they will go on sale beginning September 24th.
Like many others, Intel is strongly pushing artificial intelligence (AI). Instead of using it to power only a language model, like ChatGPT, the company uses AI in all aspects of the PC, from running games to helping with creative apps and even saving battery life. AI on PC is important because it allows processes to run on-device instead of uploading to the Cloud. For instance, you’ll be able to search through a PDF or document already on your computer instead of uploading a huge file to ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini language models. AI on PC gives full control of your laptop with a quick search.
Intel says its 200V processors will deliver up to 50 percent lower package power and up to 120 total platform TOPS (tera operations per second) across the CPU, GPU and NPU. It’s worth noting that TOPS is a measurement for AI processes. Intel also says that its NPU is 4x more powerful than the previous generation and runs AI workloads while also being energy efficient. Further, the company says the new processors offer up to 80 percent peak performance uplift and up to 20 hours of battery life in productivity use cases. Performance depends on the user; however, Intel measured its battery performance by setting the screen brightness at 50 percent, Bluetooth connected to a headset, Wi-Fi connected to an access point and office productivity running on a loop until the system ran out of battery.
You’ll also be able to generate high-quality images with text in 4-5 seconds, which is 4x faster than its Meteor Lake processor. With this, a PC using the Core Ultra 200V series processor can boost frames per second (fps) performance and improve gaming experiences by using AI to create high-quality, upscaled images. This means that a game that would only run at 720p can be upscaled with AI to 1080p and still run at its desired frames per second. This will help create more affordable gaming PCs as the game or graphics card won’t need to carry the load.
More AI use cases include automatically detecting video scene changes for easier and faster video editing.
The Core Ultra also debuts the company’s new Xe2 graphics microarchitecture, which delivers a 30 percent average performance uplift. Further, the GPU sports eight new 2nd X-cores, eight enhanced ray tracing units, support for up to three 4K monitors, and the new X Matrix Extensions AI engines with up to 67 TOPS to power creative applications and boost gaming performance.
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