introduces its first desktop processors with artificial intelligence

Few industries will change as much in 2024 as personal computing. The advent of Copilot+ computers with artificial intelligence functions running locally thanks to new processors meant a revolution in a market that needed it. Qualcomm’s new laptop processors and AMD’s new Zen 5 processor have managed to improve computer sales. It is therefore still strange that the sector’s benchmark, Intel, has so far flown under the radar.

Nobody knows that this revolution caught Intel on the wrong foot, but today the company wants to regain its rhythm and become a leader again with its new Core Ultra 200S processors: The brand’s first AI product designed for desktop computing. However, before you buy a new motherboard (the LGA 1700 socket has been discontinued), you should know some details about these new chips.

While we’ve already seen plenty of laptop processors with NPUs, Intel wants to get ahead of AMD (and possibly Qualcomm) with this desktop launch. Unfortunately, it is clear that this technology is not yet considered important in the desktop sector, since the NPU of the new Core Ultra 200S processors reaches only 13 TOP (13 billion operations per second) compared to the 48 TOPS NPU of the “Lunar Lake” laptop released this summer.

Therefore, the computer that we assemble with these processors will not be recognized as a Copilot+ PC and you won’t have access to the new artificial intelligence features of Windows 11. Intel says it could have included a 40 TOPS NPU, the minimum required for Copilot+, but decided not to make the necessary sacrifices: reducing the number of cores to include a larger, more powerful one NPU.

This is not the only frustration we may encounter, especially if we want to create a computer for video games; Performance hasn’t been a priority for Intel this generation, and the company itself admits this. According to tests published by Intel, Intel Core Ultra 200S processors worse than latest generation processors in various games, for example F1 24 or Far Cry 6; the company had to look for older games such as F1 23 or Civilization VI to demonstrate improvements over previous processors.

Otherwise, the results promise similar performance in most games, so it’s worth considering whether it’s really worth upgrading, especially after experts run independent comparisons with AMD processors. On the one hand, it’s nice that the company is honest and does not “inflate” the results, as others do; but on the other hand, it seems generation that gamers will be able to skip.

Intel has a trump card: energy efficiency. The company says it has become an overnight leader in energy efficiency; Intel Core Ultra 9 285K, the most powerful model, consumes half the energy than the previous generation Core i9-14900K, with the same performance. Some numbers are truly surprising: the difference in power reaches 165 W in games such as Space Marines 2. This will also result in much lower temperatures, down to 17 degrees, and therefore our computer fans will have to work less and make less noise.

In other words, let’s save on electricity bills with these processors, although this is unlikely to convince enthusiasts who have never had problems buying a more powerful power supply and a more complete cooling system.

Gamers may not be the target audience for these processors, but those who will be very happy are content creators and users of productivity programs, where Intel promises noticeable improvements over last-gen and AMD products. Multi-core performance in particular is amazing.with improvements of up to 30% in some tests, which should lead to the ability to run more demanding programs simultaneously. And in this case we will appreciate greater energy efficiency.

The importance of this launch for Intel is above all, since it is the first product manufactured using TSMC N3B technology, as well as first to say goodbye to Hyper-Threading on desktop computers. This technology, released in 2002, allows another thread to be processed while the kernel is not running because it has already finished working on the previous thread. In practice, this was defined as twice the number of threads compared to the number of cores (8 cores and 16 threads, etc.). This ends this generation, which has the same number of threads as cores, but Intel justifies the change with power savings.

All these changes explain the new processor range. We say goodbye to i9, i7 or i5and models are now separated by the Ultra designation with a number and model number. The top model is the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K with 24 cores, of which 8 are high-performance (P) cores with a maximum frequency of 5.7 GHz, and the rest are efficiency cores (E).

Euro prices for the Intel Core Ultra 200S have not yet been confirmed, but in the US the top model starts at $589. Several manufacturers such as Asus have already confirmed that they will release motherboards with the new 800 chipset with support for WiFi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3 and Thunderbolt 4.