Intel will be revealing its next-gen Meteor Lake processors at an event in September, along with other details about the road ahead for its CPUs.
As VideoCardz flagged up, Intel Innovation is a two-day event taking place on September 19-20, and we’ve just got the schedule for the various sessions that’ll happen there.
One of which is the ‘Intel Client Hardware Roadmap and the Rise of AI,’ the translation of which is spilling the beans about future CPUs.
In the description of the session, Intel tells us that we will learn about the “highly anticipated Intel Core Ultra processors (codename Meteor Lake)” and the firm’s “bold vision for AI.”
Meteor Lake is Intel’s next generation of processors, as mentioned, though the caveat is that these will be laptop chips.
According to the rumor mill, next-gen desktop processors will be provided via a different route: Raptor Lake Refresh. As the name indicates, this is a simple refresh of existing Raptor Lake CPUs with faster clock speeds and a bit of honing.
Analysis: Blazing a trail for power-efficiency
Meteor Lake will usher in an interesting change in Intel’s naming scheme, as you may have noticed in the above spiel: Intel Core Ultra is the new name supposedly replacing the traditional Core i9, i7, and so forth, branding. So we’ll have Intel Core Ultra 9, and Core Ultra 7 (although exactly what that’ll mean for these chips isn’t clear, except that they'll be ’premium’).
Meteor Lake is expected to achieve great things with power efficiency, with chatter on the grapevine pointing to gains in the order of 50%. We also just heard that clock speeds are faster than anticipated (going by previous leakage), but all of this must be taken with an appropriate dose of skepticism.
Clearly, though, Intel will have taken strides forward with Meteor Lake, and efficiency is key when it comes to laptops, so it makes sense that the next-gen chips will do big things on this front.
You may have noticed Intel’s mentions of AI, too, and this is referencing that Meteor Lake CPUs will have dedicated AI acceleration cores (known as a VPU). This will beef up performance for AI tasks, though we don’t yet know the full details of how, and we’ll doubtless learn more at the Innovation event.
Intel is expected to use AI in the best processors of the future to do some really clever stuff, such as examining incoming tasks and directing CPU resources appropriately to tackle any workload in the most efficient way. We may hear a bit more about that, too, as part of the ‘bold vision’ for AI going forward.