Intel's Core Ultra 200V chips aim for AI PC dominance

The race to build the most compelling AI PC processors continues with the launch of Intel's Core Ultra 200V. At Computex in June, we learned these "Lunar Lake" laptop chips would feature a powerful 48 TOPS (tera operations per second) neural processing unit for AI work, and, surprisingly enough, they'd also sport up to 32GB of built-in memory for faster performance and lower power consumption. Today at Germany's IFA trade show, Intel has given us an even closer look at its next-generation AI PC hardware.

According to Intel, the Core Ultra 200V will be "the most efficient x86 processor ever," with up to 50 percent lower on-package power consumption. In addition to bringing memory directly on the chip, Intel also doubled the cache and core count (reaching 4MB and 4 cores) for its "Low Power Island," which handles less demanding work. Performance per watt has also more than doubled across general performance and gaming, thanks tot he new Xe2 built-in GPU. (One example: Intel claims the Core Ultra 200V uses 35 percent less power than the previous generation, while also getting 32 percent faster performance.)

It's clear that Intel is gunning directly for Qualcomm, whose Arm-based Snapdragon chips have traditionally been more power efficient than x86 processors. Intel even claims it has a lead in battery life. In one test performed on the same laptop model, the Core Ultra 7 268V lasted for 20.1 hours in the UL Procyon Office Productivity benchmark, compared to 18.4 hours with a Qualcomm X Elite chip. The Snapdragon system still maintained a lead in a Microsoft Teams 3x3 test, lasting 12.7 hours compared to the Intel 268V's 10.7 hours.

In practically every way, the Core Ultra 200V is a rethinking of Intel's traditional x86 processor design. For example, the company has given up on its Hyperthreading technology, which virtually allowed a single CPU core to support multiple task threads. Instead, Intel is optimizing the new chips for single-threaded performance. The company claims the Core Ultra 200V's P-cores (performance) are 14 percent faster than the last generation, and its E-cores (efficiency) are a whopping 68 percent faster.

Unlike Qualcomm's Snapdragon chips, Intel's Core Ultra 200V processors can also run legacy x86 software without any issue. There's no emulation slowdown or Arm incompatibility to worry about. While I was impressed by the Snapdragon X Elite chips on the Surface Pro and XPS 13 Copilot+ systems, Windows on Arm performance issues remains, like their inability to play games with strong anti-cheat protection like Fortnite. If you're at all worried about running older software or games, it makes sense to stick with an x86 chip for the next few years.

While the Core Ultra 200V series tops out with 8-core 8-thread processors, Intel says it's up to three times faster than its previous chips when it comes to performance per thread. And if that's not boastful enough, Intel also claims its new Xe2 GPU is 32 percent faster than before, 68 percent speedier than Qualcomm's 12-core X Elite chip and 16 percent better than AMD's HX 370. The Xe2 also adds an additional 67 TOPS of AI compute performance, in addition to the NPU's 48 TOPS.

When it comes to AI, Intel claims the Core Ultra 9 288V's NPU is 79 percent faster denoising in Adobe Lightroom compared to its previous chip. The Snapdragon X Elite 78-100, meanwhile, was 66 percent slower than Intel's last chip. As always, we'll need to do our own testing to confirm the company's figures, but it's clearly not being shy about its potential performance leads.

The Intel Core Ultra 200V family tops out with the Ultra 9 288V, which features eight cores (4P + 4E) with up to 5.1GHz Max Turbo speeds on the P cores. That model also comes stacked with hte most powerful 8-core Xe2 Arc 140V GPU and 32GB of RAM. While all of the 200V chips feature 8-cores, their respective GPU, NPU and RAM all scale down across the line. The bottom-rung Core Ultra 226V, for example, sports a 7-core Arc GPU, 40 TOPS NPU and 16GB of RAM.

Just like Apple's M-series chips, the Core Ultra 200V's built-in memory means you won't be able to upgrade your memory down the line. That's a particular shame, as we're finally easily upgradable LPCAMM2 memory making its way to notebooks. At least Intel isn't forcing anyone to permanently live with 8GB of RAM, though.

Intel Core Ultra 200V systems will be available on September 24th from major manufacturers like Dell, ASUS and Acer.