For a lot of months, Intel has spared no alternative to remind us that its Meteor Lake chips can be those to observe — its first CPU with completely different chiplets for every element; its first on its Intel 4 course of node; its first with a devoted AI coprocessor inside. At the moment, Intel is revealing a complete lot extra.

Meteor Lake will “launch” on December 14th, the corporate now says, as essentially the most power-efficient shopper processor the corporate’s ever made — and with as much as twice the graphics efficiency, a “low energy island” that may run duties independently, and hooks into Microsoft Home windows to intelligently management the brand new chips.

In no explicit order, listed here are the highlights of Intel’s Core Extremely — as a result of yeah, this one’s not known as a Core i7.

With Meteor Lake, Intel will be a part of its friends in crafting pc chips out of Lego-like constructing blocks — the place the “CPU” and “GPU” aren’t simply separate elements on the identical chip, for instance, however truly separate items of silicon printed at completely different sizes and grafted collectively. The likes of AMD and Qualcomm have been doing this for some time, however heterogeneous computing is comparatively new to Intel.

The draw back for you is that solely a part of Intel’s chip is definitely on the corporate’s bleeding-edge Intel 4 course of. The graphics are on TSMC’s 5nm course of, and the I/O and new “SoC Tile” are on TSMC N6. However the upside is that corporations can select the very best constructing blocks — and selectively lower off energy to the remainder.

Proper out of the gate, no pun supposed, Intel is making an attempt to make use of chiplets to radically cut back how a lot energy its processors draw. And it’s doing so by taking a few of the “Central” out of CPU.

As an alternative of a single CPU or show area of the chip, every Meteor Lake has two — one on a “low energy island” that may theoretically run all by itself, with its personal effectivity CPU core, NPU AI coprocessor, media engine, and reminiscence.

The opposite processor cores are distributed amongst a “Compute Tile” on Intel 4 that homes the P (Efficiency) and E (Effectivity) cores, dubbed Redwood Cove and Crestmont, respectively, plus a separate Graphics Tile on TSMC N5.

Realistically, most individuals utilizing a pc will invoke the Compute Tile, however Intel needs to warmth up the chip as little as it might, with an enhanced “Thread Director” that solely pushes work to higher-power cores after it’s tried the lowest-power ones first:

That goes for the AI coprocessor, too — which Home windows can natively see and monitor within the Job Supervisor, by the way in which.

Since “Media” is separated from “Graphics,” built-in encoding and decoding of video might theoretically occur with out hitting the graphics tile in any respect. “An instance of that is the addition of {hardware} assist for the AV1 movie grain characteristic, which was beforehand executed with GPU shaders,” writes Intel.

Along with AV1 video, native HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort 2.1 assist, and both 8K HDR video or as much as 4 4K screens directly, that SoC tile affords Bluetooth 5.4 and Wi-Fi 7. The latter theoretically affords as much as 5.76Gbps switch speeds, assuming you handle to arrange a 320MHz channel in your office or neighborhood.

However all these “graphics”-like duties separate from GPU doesn’t imply the GPU is only for present. Intel says Meteor Lake can add its Intel Arc graphics — now with devoted ray-tracing items and as much as 8 Xe cores on the chip itself.

Intel says the “Xe LPG” GPU affords as much as twice the efficiency per watt of Xe LP, which themselves have been twice the efficiency per watt of its eleventh Gen Intel UHD that got here built-in in processors earlier than.

Additionally they assist Intel’s XeSS — its clever upscaler akin to Nvidia’s DLSS and AMD’s FSR — for the primary time on built-in graphics, which might assist enhance body charges much more.

Whereas it didn’t present any efficiency numbers, Intel says the GPU can “run at a a lot decrease minimal voltage and attain a a lot larger most clock pace” than earlier iGPUs, at effectively over 2GHz.

And Intel has developed its personal “patented low-cost vapor chamber” cooling answer, the corporate claims, to assist get gamer and creator laptops with Meteor Lake out on this planet.

Simply know that not each Meteor Lake / Core Extremely processor will get the flowery GPU. The nice print reads: “Intel Arc graphics solely obtainable on choose MTL processor-powered methods with dual-channel reminiscence.”

However the NPU — that AI coprocessor — ought to theoretically be in each chip. “The NPU will likely be obtainable throughout the complete product stack of Meteor Lake,” says Intel’s Tim Wilson, VP of structure.

(That will line up with what Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger mentioned on a July earnings name: “We’re going to construct AI into each platform we construct.” However I haven’t confirmed if Meteor Lake will seem exterior Core Extremely, so shopping for a non-Extremely chip could imply no NPU for now.)

Intel isn’t suggesting the tiny NPU will instantly imply generative AI can cease working on big cloud servers stuffed with Nvidia H100 chips, neither is the corporate saying this one NPU can do all of it when you sleep. As an alternative, it’s suggesting that you just now have choices — it’s way more environment friendly to let the NPU run picture generator Secure Diffusion, and it’s sooner and nonetheless decently extra environment friendly to have your GPU and NPU run it collectively:

The corporate didn’t appear to have a number of particular examples for a way “AI goes to reinvent the way you do every little thing on Home windows,” to borrow a phrase from Microsoft’s out-the-door Home windows boss Panos Panay — not less than past the identical issues Qualcomm’s NPUs can already do with Home windows Studio Results in Microsoft Groups.

But it surely does have an OpenVINO Inference Engine to assist discuss to these functions and pipe them on to the NPU, and a number of normal concepts, together with:

Intel is utilizing Meteor Lake as proof that it’s executing once more, as a part of Gelsinger’s grand turnaround plan for the corporate. The corporate says yields of the Intel 4 components of Meteor Lake (learn: the Compute Tile) outstrip not solely its introductions of 14nm with Broadwell and 10nm with Ice Lake but additionally its “tock” refinements to the “tick tock” method with Skylake and Tiger Lake, respectively.

None of this issues if the elements don’t truly carry out, and Intel’s mentioned nothing about uncooked efficiency or battery life in response to our questions. Reps repeatedly apologized on a convention name, saying they’d reply these kinds of questions nearer to launch. On the CPU facet, the one hints I noticed have been that the brand new Crestmont E-cores have unspecified “IPC positive factors over earlier E-cores” — although outcomes could differ, the nice print warns — and that the brand new Redwood Cove P-cores have “improved efficiency effectivity.”

However Intel says it’s investing large on this mannequin of the longer term. It’s placing $3.5 billion into New Mexico via subsequent yr and $7 billion into Penang, Malaysia, over the subsequent 10 years to put money into a “sharp ramp in capability” for Meteor Lake and different Foveros-style chips — those that three-dimensionally stack and assemble completely different constructing block chips onto a single bundle. Subsequent, it’s transferring to direct copper-to-copper bonding, one thing it’s calling Foveros Direct, and it intends to sit these chips on glass by the top of the last decade.