Intel has announced that its Meteor Lake CPUs will be the first PC SoCs to feature a dedicated VPU to accelerate Windows 11 AI models.
Intel Aims To Ship Million of Meteor Lake CPUs With Dedicate AI VPU Accelerators By Next Year
Intel's Meteor Lake CPUs will be the company's first client SoCs to offer a tiled (chiplet) design that makes use of various IPs. The chip will offer a dedicated compute, graphics, SoC, & I/O title which is Intel's strategy for its future disaggregated chip architecture. One of the key components on these new Meteor Lake CPUs will be the VPU which will be featured on the SoC tile and makes use of AI-based accelerators to power Machine Learning & Deep Learning models on the next-gen version of Windows 11.
Over the next year, Intel aims to ship millions of units of Meteor Lake with its dedicated AI engine.
As Intel scales up even more with subsequent generations of products, that massive surge in scale and volume will put AI accelerated experiences in the hands of hundreds of millions of people and enable the intelligent collaboration, processing speed and capabilities needed to drive unprecedented change.
via Intel
The built-in Neural VPU found on Meteor Lake CPUs is a dedicated AI engine integrated into the chip which combined with additional accelerators featured on the CPU and GPU can deliver a big boost in performance and make your overall experience better in several applications such as the operation of new multimedia features within Adobe Premiere Pro (Auto Reframe and Scene Edit detection).
“We’re excited to collaborate on AI with Intel with the scale Meteor Lake will bring to the Windows PC ecosystem. Together, we are enabling developers to use ONNX Runtime and related toolchains to run their AI models optimally on the Windows platform,” said Pavan Davuluri, corporate vice president, Windows Silicon & System Integration, Microsoft Corp.
In addition to ONNX-RT, with Meteor Lake developers can look forward to:
- Leveraging developer tools, including ONNX Runtime support enabled through OpenVino-EP and DirectML-EP.
- More effective machine learning on WinML/DirectML for acceleration of neural VPU and GPU.
- Microsoft Studio Effects including background blur, eye automatic-framing, voice focus.
via Intel
Intel hasn't announced when exactly Meteor Lake CPUs launch but the company hopes to ship millions of its latest chips by the next year. The company is expected to unveil more details for Meteor Lake CPUs and how it makes Windows 11 better at the Intel BUILD 2023 session today.
In addition to the official announcement, Intel's Core Ultra 7 1003H CPU has also leaked within Pugetsystem's database. This is an upcoming Meteor Lake chip that features the new branding & can be seen labeled as a Meteor Lake-P part with 16 GB DDR5-5600 SO-DIMM memory & an Arc graphics solution which is the integrated part since it features the Alchemist GPU architecture. It's the same chip that leaked out earlier and since then, we have seen multiple Meteor Lake-P CPUs leak out as reported here.
Intel Mobility CPU Lineup:
| CPU Family | Panther Lake | Lunar Lake | Arrow Lake | Meteor Lake | Raptor Lake | Alder Lake |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Process Node (CPU Tile) | Intel 18A | TSMC N3B | TSMC N3B | Intel 4 | Intel 7 | Intel 7 |
| Process Node (GPU Tile) | TSMC N3E / Intel 3 | TSMC N3B | TSMC 5nm | TSMC 5nm | Intel 7 | Intel 7 |
| CPU Architecture | Hybrid | Hybrid (Dual-Core) | Hybrid (Triple-Core) | Hybrid (Triple-Core) | Hybrid (Dual-Core) | Hybrid (Dual-Core) |
| P-Core Architecture | Cougar Cove | Lion Cove | Lion Cove | Redwood Cove | Raptor Cove | Golden Cove |
| E-Core Architecture | Darkmont | N/A | Skymont | Crestmont | Gracemont | Gracemont |
| LP E-Core Architecture (SOC) | Darkmont | Skymont | Crestmont | Crestmont | N/A | N/A |
| Top Configuration (Compute Tile) | 4+8 (H-Series) | 4+4 (MX Series) | 6+8 (H-Series) 2+8 (U-Series) | 6+8 (H-Series) 2+8 (U-Series) | 6+8 (H-Series) 8+16 (HX-Series) | 6+8 (H-Series) 8+8 (HX-Series) |
| Max Cores / Threads | 16/16 | 8/8 | 14/14 | 14/20 | 14/20 | 14/20 |
| AI NPU | NPU5 (50 TOPS) | NPU4 (48 TOPS) | NPU3.5 (13 TOPS) | NPU3 (11 TOPS) | NPU2 (7 TOPS) | NPU2 (7 TOPS) |
| Planned Lineup | Core Ultra 300 | Core Ultra 200V | Core Ultra 200 | Core Ultra 100 | 14th/13th Gen | 12th Gen |
| GPU Architecture | Xe3-LPG (Battlemage) | Xe2-LPG (Battlemage) | Xe-LPG+ (Alchemist) | Xe-LPG (Alchemist) | Iris Xe (Gen 12) | Iris Xe (Gen 12) |
| Xe Cores (Max) | 12 Xe3 Cores | 8 Xe2 Cores | 8 Xe Cores | 8 Xe Cores | 96 EUs (768 Cores) | 96 EUs (768 Cores) |
| Memory Support | LPDDR5X-9600 | LPDDR5X-8533 | DDR5-5600 LPDDR5-7500 LPDDR5X-8533 | DDR5-5600 LPDDR5-7400 LPDDR5X - 7400+ | DDR5-5200 LPDDR5-5200 LPDDR5-6400 | DDR5-4800 LPDDR5-5200 LPDDR5X-4267 |
| Memory Capacity (Max) | 128 GB | 32 GB | 128 GB | 96 GB | 64 GB | 64 GB |
| Thunderbolt Support | TB5 | TB5 | TB5 | TB4 | TB4 | TB4 |
| WiFi Capability | WiFi 7 | WiFi 7 | WiFi 7 | WiFi 6E | WiFi 6E | WiFi 6E |
| TDP | 17-45W | 17-30W | TBD | 7W-45W | 15-55W | 15-55W |
| Launch | 2H 2025 | 2H 2024 | 2H 2024 | 2H 2023 | 1H 2023 | 1H 2022 |
About the author: A Software Engineer by training and a PC enthusiast by passion, Hassan Mujtaba serves as Wccftech's Senior Editor for hardware section. With years of experience in the industry, he specializes in deep-dive technical analysis of next-generation CPU and GPU architectures, motherboards, and cooling solutions. His work involves not only breaking news on upcoming technologies but also extensive hands-on reviews and benchmarking.
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