Per one of the leaker’s “best” OEM sources, the NPU on the Core Ultra CPUs packs around 10 TOPS of compute performance. Although the number is allegedly preliminary, the source suggested that it is unlikely to have “gotten much better since my last briefing”.
Assuming the NPU inside the Core Ultra chips churns out 10 TOPS of compute, it would only match the current crop of AMD Ryzen 7040 Phoenix CPUs with the first-gen Ryzen AI and lag behind the Apple M3 which boasts 18 TOPS of NPU compute. Furthermore, AMD claims that the newly announced Ryzen 8040 Hawk Point APUs will bring 16 TOPS of NPU performance.
In other words, Meteor Lake’s AI advantage might be non-existent and Intel could find itself chasing AMD in 2024. This is exactly what MLID’s source suggests.
Fortunately, we don’t have to wait too long to find out what’s actually the case, as we are mere days away from the debut of the first Meteor Lake-powered laptops. Till then, take the information presented here with a grain of salt.
I would be a little careful drawing conclusions until the benchmarks are in. The CPU and GPU can also provide significant TOPs so actual performance will depend on many factors including power usage/budget as well as software optimizations. Hawk point is integrated on TSMC N4, which should give it a performance/watt advantage. OTOH, Meteor lake is a mixture of Intel_4, TSMC N5, and TSMC N6, and likely contains more silicon with the chiplet approach. Top end hawk point will have 8 P-cores, while meteor lake is 6 P-cores, and 10 E-cores.
Meteor Lake introduction is tomorrow (December 14th) so we should see some benchmarks soon.
This came out yesterday and maybe why AMD drifted down. AI on Xeon and on on the new mobile cpu. Still no benchmarks on any new Intel next gen chip…doc
