Intel has unveiled its Meteor Lake family of Core Ultra mobile processors at the Artificial Intelligence Everywhere event, marking a shift from the traditional Core i series. The new chips move to a chiplet-based architecture that distributes tasks across multiple chiplets to improve power efficiency and performance. Intel positions the series as optimised for ultrathin notebooks and highlights a focus on Artificial Intelligence and energy efficiency rather than purely raw core counts and clock speeds.
A key new element across the lineup is an integrated Neural Processing Unit, which provides low-power Artificial Intelligence acceleration and offloads routine AI tasks from the CPU and GPU. Intel says the Core Ultra 7 165H delivers an 11% multi-threading performance uplift compared with similar laptop processors and claims up to a 25% reduction in power use versus the Intel Core i7-1370P. Under comparable conditions Intel also reports as much as 79% less power consumption versus the Ryzen 7 7840U. The NPU is intended to improve features such as background blur, eye tracking and picture framing and to assist models like Stable Diffusion.
The lineup’s flagship, the Core Ultra 9 185H, combines 16 cores and 22 threads with six performance cores, eight efficient cores and two low-power cores on a dedicated low-power island. The chip reaches a 5.1 GHz boost clock and includes an integrated Arc GPU with eight Xe cores. Intel says the new Xe LPG graphics architecture optimises performance at lower voltages and supports XeSS upscaling and ray tracing for 1080p gaming on thin-and-light systems.
Intel has launched most of the Meteor Lake chips already, including the Core Ultra 7 165H, while the Core Ultra 9 185H is slated for availability in 2024. The series includes both H-series models with integrated Arc GPUs and U-series models with integrated Intel Graphics, so buyers should look for the H marking if they want stronger gaming performance. Several OEMs including MSI, ASUS, Samsung, Lenovo and Gigabyte have announced laptops using the new chips, with MSI previewing the Prestige 16 AI Studio and a 13-inch Prestige AI Evo and Gigabyte offering Aorus 17 and Aorus 15 models.
