Meteor Lake, Intel's (INTC +1.41%) latest family of laptop CPUs launched in December, marked the beginning of the company's push toward bringing AI capabilities to the PC. The chips were a radical departure from their predecessors. With Meteor Lake, Intel moved to a tile-based architecture that split the chips into different parts. The compute tile, which houses the CPU cores, is manufactured using the new Intel 4 process, while the other tiles make use of various processes from TSMC.
Meteor Lake chips house a vastly upgraded integrated GPU, which is a boon for gaming as well as artificial intelligence (AI) workloads. Intel also included an NPU, or neural processing unit, which is dedicated to efficiently running AI tasks. The NPU can handle AI tasks on its own, or it can team up with the GPU to accelerate those tasks further.
NASDAQ: INTC
Key Data Points
It will take time for the software support to materialize for these AI features baked into Meteor Lake chips. Intel is working with more than 100 software partners and plans to have at least 300 AI-accelerated features able to make use of its AI hardware by the end of the year. By the end of 2025, Intel expects that more than 100 million CPUs with dedicated AI hardware will be running in PCs around the world.
Meteor Lake will carry Intel's AI ambitions throughout much of 2024. The follow-up to Meteor Lake and its desktop PC counterpart will take over in the second half of the year, as confirmed by Intel at CES. While not much is known about Meteor Lake's successors, it's clear that Intel is putting a focus on AI performance.
Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake
While Intel recently launched new desktop PC CPUs, those chips were a refresh of its Raptor Lake family, which offered minor performance improvements. Raptor Lake and its hybrid architecture, mixing powerful P-cores with efficient E-cores, has been a success for Intel, providing stiff competition to AMD's competing Ryzen chips. However, Raptor Lake is manufactured on Intel's aging Intel 7 process and is far more power hungry than Ryzen as a result.
Intel's next desktop CPU will be Arrow Lake, which is essentially a refinement of Meteor Lake's design brought to desktops. Arrow Lake will use the same tile-based architecture, breaking from Raptor Lake's monolithic design. Arrow Lake will also be the first desktop CPU from Intel to feature dedicated AI hardware, following in Meteor Lake's footsteps.
Notably, the compute tile of Arrow Lake will jump to the upcoming Intel 20A manufacturing process. Intel 20A is a 2nm-class process that should bring tremendous improvements to power efficiency over Intel 7, and it also will be the first process from Intel to use the company's new RibbonFET transistor design and backside power delivery. Long story short, Intel 20A represents a huge leap forward in efficiency and performance, and Arrow Lake will benefit.
Intel also confirmed that Lunar Lake, its next family of laptop CPUs, is also coming in the second half of 2024. Much less is known about Lunar Lake. Intel has yet to confirm what manufacturing process the new laptop chips will use, for example. However, the company did say that Lunar Lake will deliver substantial performance improvements overall and more than triple the AI performance thanks to GPU and NPU upgrades. Intel is already shipping Lunar Lake to partners, a sign that the chips are nearly ready to go.
A big year coming for Intel
As demand for PCs begins to bounce back in 2024, Intel will try to reclaim its dominance with an aggressive launch schedule. The company's manufacturing roadmap appears to be on track, and both Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake will benefit from major performance and efficiency improvements as a result.
While AMD has also been building AI hardware into some of its PC chips, the company is not nearly as gung ho about it as Intel. It appears that every PC CPU Intel launches from here on out will feature an NPU, while AMD has limited its AI hardware to certain models. Intel's leading market share and its aggressive push to get AI hardware into every PC could give it an edge as software companies tune their products for the most prolific platform.
Intel enters 2024 in a strong position in the PC market. Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake will build on that strength in the second half of the year.
