New chips are coming as Intel pushes on for the next level of content creation and gaming processing hardware.
The term “AI PC” is almost one year old, and while we’re still not entirely sure what AI contributes to the PC experience, hardware makers aren’t wasting time making the hardware even better.
We heard last month that Intel was ready with its second-gen “Core Ultra” technology for laptops, the Core Ultra 200V. These new chips effectively boast more processing power and AI capabilities than the laptops currently being released with the first-gen Core Ultra AI hardware, and now Intel is doing the same on the desktop side of things.
Gamers and content creators are in the crosshairs for this release, with five desktop processors sporting up to eight performance cores and up to 16 efficiency cores, complete with neural processing units and graphics support using the Intel Xe graphic systems.
That’s what’s coming in the Intel Core Ultra 200S chips, which aim to deliver lower power consumption while improving performance overall, with up to 50 percent fast performance in AI-enabled solutions, though that will depend on what it is.
At the high-end, Intel will offer the Core Ultra 9 285K, a 24-core chip with four graphics cores, while it will also offer four graphics cores alongside an abundance of CPU cores in the 20-core Intel Core Ultra 7 265K and 14-cre Ultra 5 245KF. Folks who don’t need the graphics of the Intel chip will also find variants of the Ultra 5 and Ultra 7 without GPUs.
As for what these pieces of hardware will do for AI applications, that remains to be seen beyond the obvious note of “making them faster”. Codenamed “Arrow Lake”, Intel says the third-generation neural processing unit is optimised for AI performance, making it what Intel calls the first AI PCs “for enthusiasts”.
Even if you can’t figure out how these will improve AI on PCs, they should also improve performance for other apps, which is largely the point.
The new chips will start making their way into new computers later this month.
