Intel hopes to reinvent the PC with Core Ultra SoC

Long-time PC industry watchers know that new chip introductions are an important but often mundane part of the PC evolutionary process. After all, every year you can count on semiconductor giants Intel and AMD to bring their next generation CPUs to the market.

This year, however, things are different – very different. First, the newest offering from Intel – codenamed Meteor Lake and officially called Core Ultra – offers what the company is calling its largest generational and architectural changes in 40 years. The new chip integrates not only some important new design philosophies, chip packaging technologies and advanced technology support, it's also the first Intel processor with an integrated AI accelerator, which Intel is calling an NPU (neural processing unit).

Second, that NPU integration is a key indicator of the fact that we've entered into a critically important new era of personal computing, the age of AI computing. While CPUs ...