Intel’s “Meteor Lake” processors for laptops will launch on Dec. 14, but under the umbrella of the new “Core Ultra” brand, according to company CEO Pat Gelsinger.
On Tuesday during the Intel Innovation event in San Jose, Calif., Gelsinger revealed the launch date for its initial wave of Meteor Lake processors, the first to feature the company’s long-delayed 7-nanometer manufacturing node, also known as Intel 4. But it looks like Meteor Lake won’t arrive for the non-Ultra Core brand, at least not initially.
To bolster the marketing for Meteor Lake, Intel in June decided to overhaul the Core branding for its consumer CPUs, separating the naming into two tiers: the standard Core, and the premium Core Ultra.
At the time, Intel said the Core Ultra tier will stand out by offering exclusive features, such as AI-powered capabilities. Now Gelsinger is indicating the Meteor Lake architecture will first arrive through the Core Ultra brand in December to unlock a new era of “AI PCs.”
Indeed, the upcoming Meteor Lake architecture contains Intel’s first-ever Neural Processing Unit or NPU, which is dedicated to AI workloads, such as image or voice generation. During his keynote speech, Gelsinger joined Jerry Kao, the chief operating officer of Acer, to show off an Acer Swift laptop built with an upcoming Core Ultra processor.
By tapping the chip’s NPU, the laptop was able to power an AI image generator locally, and even partially animate the image through an Acer software feature called Parallax. All of this was seemingly done in just a minute or less using the NPU's power-efficient architecture.
The NPU means consumers will be able to run AI programs on their own hardware, rather than relying on third-party cloud services. During Gelsinger’s talk, however, no mention was made of whether the standard, non-Ultra Core brand will also receive the Meteor Lake architecture or an NPU, or follow a different path.
We’ve reached out to Intel for comment, but it’s possible the company has decided to stagger the Meteor Lake release. A new roadmap shown during Gelsinger's talk also signals that the company plans to launch three new architectures next year, Arrow Lake, Lunar Lake, and Panther Lake, which will also power new consumer CPUs.
