“Intel’s First Demonstration of Meteor Lake Processor with Neural Processing Unit (NPU)”

Intel has given a select group of journalists, including Tweakers, a first demonstration of a Meteor Lake processor. These processors will be available for laptops later this year and include a neural processing unit, which Intel showed at work in a pre-production laptop.

The operation of the Meteor Lake chip and specifically the npu was demonstrated in the generative AI program Stable Diffusion, which showed the generated images directly in GIMP via a plug-in. With a two-line prompt and negative prompt, generating a 512×512 pixel image took twenty seconds. According to the chip manufacturer, if the software only used the CPU and GPU, it would have taken ‘much longer’ and would also have consumed much more power.

The integrated npu uses a further developed technology from Movidius, which was acquired by Intel in 2016. In 2017, an AI accelerator with that technology became available as an expansion module in USB stick format. The npu will be compatible with the Onnx, DirectML, W3C WNN and OpenVino standards. According to Intel, the npu is particularly suitable for taking over long-term AI workloads. For short-term tasks, the CPU would remain the processor of choice; for AI applications in media or render pipelines, that remains the gpu. Enabling the npu also brings something latency with him. For a small task, this does not outweigh the extra computing power.

Prior to the demonstration, which took place in Taipei on the eve of the Computex trade show, Intel confirmed that Meteor Lake and its successor Arrow Lake tiles, or chiplets exist. Some of those tiles are produced by Intel itself. The npu is part of the SoC tile. However, the GPU tile, among other things, is produced by TSMC. An Intel spokesperson confirmed to Tweakers that the GPU tile is comparable to a low-end Arc GPU. This is probably the A380 with 128 execution unitsalthough it is obvious that the igpu version will be a bit slower due to lower clock speeds.

Although Intel would not confirm the rest of the specifications of the processor shown, it is probably a chip with six P-cores, eight E-cores and an additional two E-cores that are not part of the on ‘Intel 4’ produced compute tile, but are in the SoC tile just like the npu. These cores are according to reliable rumours even more economical than the regular E-cores and would remain active when the system is in connected standby stands. This would allow the compute tile itself to be completely deactivated in sleep mode to save power.

Intel declined to say anything about the Meteor Lake processors for desktops, which have been largely canceled according to recent rumors. The company also did not want to say anything about questions about the potential brand change to ‘Core Ultra’. It promises to provide more clarity about the latter in the coming months, before Meteor Lake comes on the market.