The new Core Ultra laptop chips target gamers and enthusiasts (200HX), premium laptops (200H), and ultralights (200U)—with a total of 15 new SKUs announced across the Ultra 5, 7, and 9 series. Chips will have between 10 and 24 cores and do not have memory on the die. Only the 200H line will use Intel’s upscaled integrated Arc graphics; the others will opt for lower-end silicon (though 200HX systems will surely pair the chip with discrete graphics processing).
As they’re built on Arrow Lake and not the newer Lunar Lake, all three new chips will still miss out on Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC designation. Despite boasting overall performance of 99 TOPS, the NPUs on these chips won’t have enough juice to hit the requirement of 40 TOPS (Trillions of Operations Per Second) delivered on their own. For what it’s worth, Intel’s messaging strongly stresses that “TOPS alone does not define AI performance.”
Intel Core 200S/200H/100U
This series is a desktop-class chip collection denoted by the lack of an “Ultra” in the name. The 200S is a new design, formally code-named Bartlett Lake, while the 200H and 100U are updates of the 13th- and 14th-generation Intel Core “Raptor Lake” platform, which launched in October 2022. Intel didn’t share much on what distinguishes these chips or where they’re likely to end up.
Intel Twin Lake
Codenamed Twin Lake, the Intel Core 3 and the Intel (no model name) processor are both very low-power chips (as low as 6 watts) targeted at “low-power, low-cost edge systems.” Imagine these showing up in bare-bones laptops and embedded systems like storage devices, televisions, and so on.
Intel Core Ultra 200V
This is an existing Lunar Lake chip that is getting Intel vPro features, which is an enterprise management and security system.
Qualcomm
Qualcomm had a lot of news, but its PC-centric announcement list was relatively tame, limited to these two updates. Complete details can be found here.
Qualcomm Snapdragon X
This is the fourth platform in the Snapdragon series and the lowest cost of them all, designed to be installed in Copilot+ PCs in the rock-bottom $600 range. It’s a single-SKU, 8-core chip with stated performance of 45 TOPS. Qualcomm is also targeting mini desktop PCs with this chip for the first time. Devices are expected in “early 2025.”
The Snapdragon X lineup. Courtesy of Qualcomm
Better Native App Support on Qualcomm PCs
Snapdragon Copilot+ PCs famously can’t run a number of applications, including most VPN software and various cloud storage apps. That’s been changing in recent weeks (many of these apps are now in beta), and Qualcomm says it’s only going to get better.
AMD
AMD’s new Ryzen CPUs. Courtesy of AMD
Given AMD’s recent gains in the market—it has over a third of the x86 market today—I was expecting some big news from the chipmaker, but that wasn’t the case. AMD announced a handful of new CPUs in a fairly no-nonsense presentation focused largely on its performance leadership and how much the company loved video games. Notably absent at the keynote: No announcement or even much of a mention of new Radeon GPUs, though a new series was revealed after the presentation. (About half of the presentation was dedicated to corporate devices and the company’s many enterprise partnerships.)
Original Author: Christopher Null | Source: Wired
