Intel has new designations for its next major CPU architecture – Ars Technica

As part of an effort to “simplify Intel’s portfolio of brands,” Intel has announced some changes to its processor brand starting with the next generation of Meteor Lake CPUs.

The smallest change is that Intel’s flagship CPUs lose their “i”, switching from Core i3/i5/i7/i9 to Core 3/5/7/9. Intel will also stop using “generation” letters in its processor branding — none of its new CPUs will be announced, released, or advertised as “14th generation.”

Intel’s branding from generation to generation has always been a bit arbitrary, anyway. The “first generation” Core chips followed several generations of Core and Core 2 processors, and branded Intel began using them for their chips in the mid-2000s at the end of the Pentium 4 era. The Core 2 Duo and Core 2 brands were used Quad has several distinct generations of chips that have used different manufacturing technologies and revised architectures.

To make up for the words it removes from its trademark, Intel also adds a new word. Its flagship processors will now be known simply as Core 3, Core 5, and Core 7. But its high-end chips will be called Core Ultra 5, Core Ultra 7, or Core Ultra 9. The company didn’t go into detail about what makes an Ultra processor, though we do know that the chipset Core 3 I can not Ultra is, while Core 9 chips can Just be super.

Intel’s CPU model numbers will continue to include generation numbering to help distinguish them from one another, and the company will continue to use suffix letters to distinguish different product segments from one another. So what used to be an “Intel Core i7-14700K processor” may now be an “Intel Core Ultra 7 14700K processor” (Intel says it prefers the word “processor” to fall between the “Core Ultra 7” part and the CPU model number).

This is part of a broader change to Intel’s processor branding strategy; Last year, the company ditched the Pentium and Celeron brand names for lower-end laptop CPUs. It now refers to those Intel processors as Intel processors. AMD has also realigned its laptop processor model numbers to take into account the fact that it ships several completely different CPU and GPU pairs under the same “Ryzen 7000” umbrella.

What we know about Meteorite Lake

Meteor Lake’s rebrand is perhaps the least significant of the many architecture changes — there are several historic firsts here, hidden among the expected CPU and GPU performance improvements.

Much of what sets Meteor Lake apart has to do with how the slide is manufactured and packaged. It will be Intel’s first consumer CPU to use a chip-based design (Intel calls it a “tile”). This means that Intel will divide its processors into many silicon molds that use different manufacturing techniques in order to improve performance and efficiency.

This comes with advantages and disadvantages – you need to make sure that these squares can connect as quickly as they can if they are all part of the same piece of silicone, but you can also mix and match manufacturing processes to improve performance, strength and efficiency while reducing costs. Intel will use Foveros technology to make Meteor Lake a success; Foveros stacks wood panels directly on top of each other, facilitating quick connection between them while reducing the amount of physical space needed for packaging.

Meteor Lake’s main CPU tiles will continue to use a hybrid approach, combining large, high-performance cores with small, efficient electronic cores. These tiles are manufactured by Intel itself, in the company’s new Intel 4 manufacturing process; The current 13th Gen CPUs are built using Intel 7, which Intel has been using and refining since 2019 or so. But others, including the GPU board, It is manufactured by TSMC, which was unimaginable for Intel just a few years ago. The company’s Arc GPUs are also manufactured by TSMC.

Intel claims it will get manufacturing back on track in the next few years, having largely squandered the lead it had a decade ago due to a problem with the 14nm and 10nm processes (Intel 7 is another name for a version of the 10nm process). . It also hopes to attract third-party customers to use its chip fabricators, opening up an important and much-needed new revenue stream. For what it’s worth, the company seems more or less on track to meet Intel’s original Process 4 deadlines, even if it relied on TSMC to help it get actual products to market.

Speaking of graphics tiles made by TSMC, Meteor Lake will be Intel’s biggest GPU upgrade in years, after using similar Iris Xe GPUs in the 11th, 12th, and 13th generation chips. Meteor Lake graphics chip is Based on the same Alchemy architecture As Intel’s Arc A-series dedicated graphics cards. Among other improvements, it is hoped that they will bring hardware-accelerated AV1 video encoding and integrated Intel graphics decoding, as well as support for ray tracing and Better XeSS upgrade.

The other big plus would be Hardware acceleration for AI workloads. Generative AI has attracted a huge amount of hype in the past year or so, but accelerating AI in Meteor Lake is going to be a bit more like “neuromotorThat Apple has been building its A and M series chipsets for years now, or what AMD is and Qualcomm It has been included in some of its recent processors.

Although it can be used for language models and Generate imagesApple has mostly used this device to do relatively simple and straightforward things like matching faces between photos in users’ camera rolls, writing voicemail messages, and separating foreground and background objects in photos and video streams. The ability to speed up these types of workloads means that more processing can be done locally on your machine without the data being sent to be resolved by some server somewhere, although in the end it’s likely to be Microsoft who determines exactly how that machine is used.

Desktop users may need to wait to take advantage of any of these changes and improvements. current rumors Suggest Many of the 14th generation desktop chips will be another revision of the Alder Lake architecture originally introduced in the 12th generation. The 13th generation Raptor Lake chips have improved the architecture with more electronic cores, faster clock speeds, and more cache (on some models). Another revision of Alder Lake would likely use similar methods to increase performance, though early rumors suggested the chips would also come with increased power usage, and power efficiency is already a weak point for Intel’s desktop chips relative to AMD and especially Apple.

We also don’t know if the new desktop CPUs will be compatible with previous-generation 600 and 700 motherboards or if Intel will need a newer motherboard to meet its power requirements. That’s what Intel did in the switch from seventh to eighth generation desktop CPUs: It continued to use the same physical socket for the processors but required new motherboards with new chipsets to physically support it.

Intel is expected to release its first Meteor Lake chips, along with changes to its brand, In the second half of 2023.