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> Today at CES, Intel unveiled Intel Core Ultra Series 3 processors, the first AI PC platform built on Intel 18A process technology that was designed and manufa

by DrammBA 9mo ago

> Today at CES, Intel unveiled Intel Core Ultra Series 3 processors, the first AI PC platform built on Intel 18A process technology that was designed and manufactured in the United States. Powering over 200 designs from leading, global partners, Series 3 will be the most broadly adopted and globally available AI PC platform Intel has ever delivered. What in the world is this disaster of an opening paragraph? From the weird "AI PC platform" (not sure what that is) to the "will be the most broadly adopted and globally available AI PC platform" (is that a promise? a prediction? a threat?). And you just gotta love the processor names "Intel Core Ultra Series 3 Mobile X9/X7"

dangus 9mo ago
Intel marketing isn’t the best but I am struggling to understand what issue you’re taking with this. It’s an AI PC platform. It can do AI. It has an NPU and integrated GPU. That’s pretty straightforward. Competitors include Apple silicon and AMD Ryzen AI. They’re predicting it’ll sell well, and they have a huge distribution network with a large number of partner products launching. Basically they’re saying every laptop and similar device manufacturer out there is going to stuff these chips in their systems. I think they just have some well-placed confidence in the laptop segment, because it’s supposed to combine the strong efficiency of the 200 series with the kind of strong performance that can keep up with or exceed competition from AMD’s current laptop product lineup. Their naming sucks but nobody’s really a saint on that.
- webdevver 9mo ago
  i cant believe we're still putting NPUs into new designs. silicon taken up that couldve been used for a few more compute units on the GPU, which is often faster at inference anyway and way more useful/flexible/programmable/documented.
  - cromka 9mo ago
    Guess they're following Apple here whose NPUs get all the support possible, as far as I can tell.
    - dangus 9mo ago
      Bingo. Maybe Microsoft shouldn’t even be chasing them but I think they have a point to try and stay competitive. They can’t just have their OS getting half the battery life of their main competitor. When you use an Apple device, it’s performing ML tasks while barely using any battery life. That’s the whole point of the NPU. It’s not there to outperform the GPU.
  - zmb_ 9mo ago
    You can thank Microsoft for that. Intel architects in fact did not want to waste area on an NPU. That caused Microsoft to launch their AI-whatever branded PCs with Qualcomm who were happy to throw in whatever Microsoft wanted to get to be the launch partner. After than Intel had to follow suit to make Microsoft happy.
    - dangus 9mo ago
      That doesn’t explain why Apple “wastes” die area on their NPU. The thing is, when you get an Apple product and you take a picture, those devices are performing ML tasks while sipping battery life. Microsoft maybe shouldn’t be chasing Apple especially since they don’t actually have any marketshare in tablets or phones, but I see where they’re getting at: they are probably tired of their OS living on devices that get half the battery life of their main competition. And here’s the thing, Qualcomm’s solution blows Intel out of the water. The only reason not to use it is because Microsoft can’t provide the level of architecture transition that Apple does. Apple can get 100% of their users to switch architecture in about 7 years whenever they want.
  - stockresearcher 9mo ago
    Every modern chip needs some percentage dedicated to dark silicon. There is no cheating the thermal reality. You could add more compute units in the GPU, but you then have to make up for it somewhere else. It’s a balancing act. The Core Ultra lineup is supposed to be low-power, low-heat, right? If you want more compute power, pick something from a different product series.
    - wtallis 9mo ago
      > Every modern chip needs some percentage dedicated to dark silicon. There is no cheating the thermal reality. You could add more compute units in the GPU, but you then have to make up for it somewhere else. It’s a balancing act. I think that "dark silicon" mentality is mostly lingering trauma from when the industry first hit a wall with the end of Dennard scaling. These days, it's quite clear that you can have a chip that's more or less fully utilized, certainly with no "dark" blocks that are as large as a NPU. You just need to have the ability to run the chip at lower clock speeds to stay within power and thermal constraints—something that was not well-developed in 2005's processors. For the kind of parallel compute that GPUs and NPUs tackle, adding more cores but running them at lower clock speeds and lower voltages usually does result in better efficiency in practice. The real answer to the GPU vs NPU question isn't that the GPU couldn't grow, but that the NPU has a drastically different architecture making very different power vs performance tradeoffs that theoretically give it a niche of use cases where the NPU is a better choice than the GPU for some inference tasks.
  - astrange 9mo ago
    NPUs aren't designed to be "faster", they are designed to have better perf/power ratios.
jmward01 9mo ago
I think I have given up on chip naming. I honestly can't tell anymore there are so many modifiers on the names these days. I assume 9 is better than 7 right? Right?
- chrismorgan 9mo ago
  > I assume 9 is better than 7 right? Right? Oh, the number of times I’ve heard someone assume their five- or ten-year-old machine must be powerful because it’s an i7… no, the i3-14100 (released two years ago) is uniformly significantly superior to the i7-9700 (released five years before that), and only falls behind the i9-9900 in multithreaded performance. Within the same product family and generation, I expect 9 is better than 7, but honestly it wouldn’t surprise me to find counterexamples.
  - gambiting 9mo ago
    >>Within the same product family and generation, I expect 9 is better than 7 Ah the good old Dell laptop engineering, where the i9 is better on paper, but in reality it throttles within 5 seconds of starting any significant load and the cpu nerfs itself below even i5 performance. Classic Dell move.
    - chrismorgan 9mo ago
      Within the same family and generation, I don’t think this should happen any more. But especially in the past, some laptops were configurable with processors of different generations or families (M, Q, QM, U, so many possibilities) so that the i7 option might have worse real-world performance than the i5 (due to more slower cores).
      - tracker1 9mo ago
        It's been a cooling problem on a lot of i9 laptops... the CPU will hit thermal peaks, then throttle down, this has an incredibly janky feel as a user... then it spins back up, and down... the performance curves just wacky in general. Today is almost worse, as the thermal limits will be set entirely different between laptop vendors on the same chips, so you can't even have apples to apples performance expectations from different vendors.
octoberfranklin 9mo ago
Laptop names are even worse: > Are ZBooks good or do I want an OmniBook or ProBook? Within ZBook, is Ultra or Fury better? Do I want a G1a or a G1i? Oh you sell ZBook Firefly G11, I liked that TV show, is that one good? https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2025/11/29/bikeshedding-or-laptop.html https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2025/11/29/bikes...
- lostlogin 9mo ago
  And that root of all that shit lies Apple and the ‘book’ suffix.
  - kergonath 9mo ago
    Apple is very consistent. You have the MacBook Air (lighter, more portable variant) and the MacBook Pro (more expensive and powerful variant). They don’t mess around with model numbers.
    - deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]
    - lostlogin 9mo ago
      > Apple is very consistent. You have the MacBook Air (lighter, more portable variant) and the MacBook Pro (more expensive and powerful variant). What about the iBook? That wasn’t tidy. Ebooks or laptops? Or the iPhone 9? That didn’t exist. Or MacOS? Versioning got a bit weird after 10.9, due the X thing. They do mess around with model numbers and have just done it again with the change to year numbers. I don’t particularly care but they aren’t all clean and pure. https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/05/28/gurman-version-years https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/05/28/gurman-version-...
      - stefanfisk 9mo ago
        It was a response to you specifically calling out the book suffix. And what was unclear iBook VS PowerBook?
cherioo 9mo ago
AI PC has been in the buzz for more than 2 years now (despite itself being a near useless concept), and intel has like 75% marketshare for laptop. Both of those are well with in norm for an intel marketing piece. It’s not really meant for consumer. Who would even visit newsroom.intel.com?
- lostlogin 9mo ago
  Apparently it’s been a thing for a while: What is an AI PC? ('Look, Ma! No Cloud!') An AI PC has a CPU, a GPU and an NPU, each with specific AI acceleration capabilities. An NPU, or neural processing unit, is a specialized accelerator that handles artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) tasks right on your PC instead of sending data to be processed in the cloud. https://newsroom.intel.com/artificial-intelligence/what-is-an-ai-pc#gs.6yib7p https://newsroom.intel.com/artificial-intelligence/what-is-a...
  - sidewndr46 9mo ago
    It'd be interesting to see some market survey data showing the number of AI laptops sold & the number of users that actively use the acceleration capabilities for any task, even once.
    - sixothree 9mo ago
      I'm not sure I've ever heard of a single task that comes built into the system and uses the NPU.
      - fassssst 9mo ago
        Remove background from an image. Summarize some text. OCR to select text or click links in a screenshot. Relighting and centering you in your webcam. Semantic search for images and files. A lot of that is in the first party Mac and Windows apps.
        lostlogin 9mo ago
CyberDildonics 9mo ago
It's a disaster along with the title. There isn't a lot of clear information.
hnuser123456 9mo ago
It means they did cost cutting on Lunar Lake and are excited to sell a lot of them at similar or higher prices.
- ajross 9mo ago
  > cost cutting on Lunar Lake It's... the launch vehicle for a new process. Literally the opposite of "cost cutting", they went through the trouble of tooling up a whole fab over multiple years to do this. Will 18A beat TSMC and save the company? We don't know. But they put down a huge bet that it would, and this is the hand that got dealt. It's important, not something to be dismissed.
  - hnuser123456 9mo ago
    Lunar Lake integrated DRAM on the package, which was faster and more power efficient, this reverts that. They also replaced part of the chip from being sourced from TSMC to from themselves. And if their foundry is competitive, they should be shaking other foundry customers down the way TSMC is. If they have actually mostly caught up to TSMC, props, but also, I wish they hadn't given up on EUV for so long. Instead they decided to ship chips overclocked so high they burn out in months.
    - ajross 9mo ago
      I don't see how any of that substantiates "Panther Lake and 18A are just cost cutting efforts vs. Lunar Lake". It mostly just sounds like another boring platform flame.
      - hnuser123456 9mo ago
        I'll let Intel speak for themselves here: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/lunar-lakes-integrated-memory-is-an-expensive-one-off-intel-rejects-the-approach-for-future-cpus-due-to-margin-impact https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/lunar-lakes-...

by DrammBA 9mo ago

dangus 9mo ago

Intel marketing isn’t the best but I am struggling to understand what issue you’re taking with this. It’s an AI PC platform. It can do AI. It has an NPU and integrated GPU. That’s pretty straightforward. Competitors include Apple silicon and AMD Ryzen AI. They’re predicting it’ll sell well, and they have a huge distribution network with a large number of partner products launching. Basically they’re saying every laptop and similar device manufacturer out there is going to stuff these chips in their systems. I think they just have some well-placed confidence in the laptop segment, because it’s supposed to combine the strong efficiency of the 200 series with the kind of strong performance that can keep up with or exceed competition from AMD’s current laptop product lineup. Their naming sucks but nobody’s really a saint on that.

webdevver 9mo ago
i cant believe we're still putting NPUs into new designs. silicon taken up that couldve been used for a few more compute units on the GPU, which is often faster at inference anyway and way more useful/flexible/programmable/documented.
- cromka 9mo ago
  Guess they're following Apple here whose NPUs get all the support possible, as far as I can tell.
  - dangus 9mo ago
    Bingo. Maybe Microsoft shouldn’t even be chasing them but I think they have a point to try and stay competitive. They can’t just have their OS getting half the battery life of their main competitor. When you use an Apple device, it’s performing ML tasks while barely using any battery life. That’s the whole point of the NPU. It’s not there to outperform the GPU.
- zmb_ 9mo ago
  You can thank Microsoft for that. Intel architects in fact did not want to waste area on an NPU. That caused Microsoft to launch their AI-whatever branded PCs with Qualcomm who were happy to throw in whatever Microsoft wanted to get to be the launch partner. After than Intel had to follow suit to make Microsoft happy.
  - dangus 9mo ago
    That doesn’t explain why Apple “wastes” die area on their NPU. The thing is, when you get an Apple product and you take a picture, those devices are performing ML tasks while sipping battery life. Microsoft maybe shouldn’t be chasing Apple especially since they don’t actually have any marketshare in tablets or phones, but I see where they’re getting at: they are probably tired of their OS living on devices that get half the battery life of their main competition. And here’s the thing, Qualcomm’s solution blows Intel out of the water. The only reason not to use it is because Microsoft can’t provide the level of architecture transition that Apple does. Apple can get 100% of their users to switch architecture in about 7 years whenever they want.
- stockresearcher 9mo ago
  Every modern chip needs some percentage dedicated to dark silicon. There is no cheating the thermal reality. You could add more compute units in the GPU, but you then have to make up for it somewhere else. It’s a balancing act. The Core Ultra lineup is supposed to be low-power, low-heat, right? If you want more compute power, pick something from a different product series.
  - wtallis 9mo ago
    > Every modern chip needs some percentage dedicated to dark silicon. There is no cheating the thermal reality. You could add more compute units in the GPU, but you then have to make up for it somewhere else. It’s a balancing act. I think that "dark silicon" mentality is mostly lingering trauma from when the industry first hit a wall with the end of Dennard scaling. These days, it's quite clear that you can have a chip that's more or less fully utilized, certainly with no "dark" blocks that are as large as a NPU. You just need to have the ability to run the chip at lower clock speeds to stay within power and thermal constraints—something that was not well-developed in 2005's processors. For the kind of parallel compute that GPUs and NPUs tackle, adding more cores but running them at lower clock speeds and lower voltages usually does result in better efficiency in practice. The real answer to the GPU vs NPU question isn't that the GPU couldn't grow, but that the NPU has a drastically different architecture making very different power vs performance tradeoffs that theoretically give it a niche of use cases where the NPU is a better choice than the GPU for some inference tasks.
- astrange 9mo ago
  NPUs aren't designed to be "faster", they are designed to have better perf/power ratios.

jmward01 9mo ago

I think I have given up on chip naming. I honestly can't tell anymore there are so many modifiers on the names these days. I assume 9 is better than 7 right? Right?

chrismorgan 9mo ago
> I assume 9 is better than 7 right? Right? Oh, the number of times I’ve heard someone assume their five- or ten-year-old machine must be powerful because it’s an i7… no, the i3-14100 (released two years ago) is uniformly significantly superior to the i7-9700 (released five years before that), and only falls behind the i9-9900 in multithreaded performance. Within the same product family and generation, I expect 9 is better than 7, but honestly it wouldn’t surprise me to find counterexamples.
- gambiting 9mo ago
  >>Within the same product family and generation, I expect 9 is better than 7 Ah the good old Dell laptop engineering, where the i9 is better on paper, but in reality it throttles within 5 seconds of starting any significant load and the cpu nerfs itself below even i5 performance. Classic Dell move.
  - chrismorgan 9mo ago
    Within the same family and generation, I don’t think this should happen any more. But especially in the past, some laptops were configurable with processors of different generations or families (M, Q, QM, U, so many possibilities) so that the i7 option might have worse real-world performance than the i5 (due to more slower cores).
    - tracker1 9mo ago
      It's been a cooling problem on a lot of i9 laptops... the CPU will hit thermal peaks, then throttle down, this has an incredibly janky feel as a user... then it spins back up, and down... the performance curves just wacky in general. Today is almost worse, as the thermal limits will be set entirely different between laptop vendors on the same chips, so you can't even have apples to apples performance expectations from different vendors.

octoberfranklin 9mo ago

Laptop names are even worse: > Are ZBooks good or do I want an OmniBook or ProBook? Within ZBook, is Ultra or Fury better? Do I want a G1a or a G1i? Oh you sell ZBook Firefly G11, I liked that TV show, is that one good? https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2025/11/29/bikeshedding-or-laptop.html https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2025/11/29/bikes...

lostlogin 9mo ago
And that root of all that shit lies Apple and the ‘book’ suffix.
- kergonath 9mo ago
  Apple is very consistent. You have the MacBook Air (lighter, more portable variant) and the MacBook Pro (more expensive and powerful variant). They don’t mess around with model numbers.
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  - lostlogin 9mo ago
    > Apple is very consistent. You have the MacBook Air (lighter, more portable variant) and the MacBook Pro (more expensive and powerful variant). What about the iBook? That wasn’t tidy. Ebooks or laptops? Or the iPhone 9? That didn’t exist. Or MacOS? Versioning got a bit weird after 10.9, due the X thing. They do mess around with model numbers and have just done it again with the change to year numbers. I don’t particularly care but they aren’t all clean and pure. https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/05/28/gurman-version-years https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/05/28/gurman-version-...
    - stefanfisk 9mo ago
      It was a response to you specifically calling out the book suffix. And what was unclear iBook VS PowerBook?

cherioo 9mo ago

AI PC has been in the buzz for more than 2 years now (despite itself being a near useless concept), and intel has like 75% marketshare for laptop. Both of those are well with in norm for an intel marketing piece. It’s not really meant for consumer. Who would even visit newsroom.intel.com?

lostlogin 9mo ago
Apparently it’s been a thing for a while: What is an AI PC? ('Look, Ma! No Cloud!') An AI PC has a CPU, a GPU and an NPU, each with specific AI acceleration capabilities. An NPU, or neural processing unit, is a specialized accelerator that handles artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) tasks right on your PC instead of sending data to be processed in the cloud. https://newsroom.intel.com/artificial-intelligence/what-is-an-ai-pc#gs.6yib7p https://newsroom.intel.com/artificial-intelligence/what-is-a...
- sidewndr46 9mo ago
  It'd be interesting to see some market survey data showing the number of AI laptops sold & the number of users that actively use the acceleration capabilities for any task, even once.
  - sixothree 9mo ago
    I'm not sure I've ever heard of a single task that comes built into the system and uses the NPU.
    - fassssst 9mo ago
      Remove background from an image. Summarize some text. OCR to select text or click links in a screenshot. Relighting and centering you in your webcam. Semantic search for images and files. A lot of that is in the first party Mac and Windows apps.
      - lostlogin 9mo ago

CyberDildonics 9mo ago

It's a disaster along with the title. There isn't a lot of clear information.

hnuser123456 9mo ago

It means they did cost cutting on Lunar Lake and are excited to sell a lot of them at similar or higher prices.

ajross 9mo ago
> cost cutting on Lunar Lake It's... the launch vehicle for a new process. Literally the opposite of "cost cutting", they went through the trouble of tooling up a whole fab over multiple years to do this. Will 18A beat TSMC and save the company? We don't know. But they put down a huge bet that it would, and this is the hand that got dealt. It's important, not something to be dismissed.
- hnuser123456 9mo ago
  Lunar Lake integrated DRAM on the package, which was faster and more power efficient, this reverts that. They also replaced part of the chip from being sourced from TSMC to from themselves. And if their foundry is competitive, they should be shaking other foundry customers down the way TSMC is. If they have actually mostly caught up to TSMC, props, but also, I wish they hadn't given up on EUV for so long. Instead they decided to ship chips overclocked so high they burn out in months.
  - ajross 9mo ago
    I don't see how any of that substantiates "Panther Lake and 18A are just cost cutting efforts vs. Lunar Lake". It mostly just sounds like another boring platform flame.
    - hnuser123456 9mo ago
      I'll let Intel speak for themselves here: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/lunar-lakes-integrated-memory-is-an-expensive-one-off-intel-rejects-the-approach-for-future-cpus-due-to-margin-impact https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/lunar-lakes-...