Intel Corp. today introduced a new line of laptop processors touted as its most power-efficient to date. 

The Core Ultra 200V series, as the product family is called, comprises nine chips on launch. The flagship Core Ultra 9 288V can perform as many as 120 trillion computations per second. More notably, it does so with twice the power efficiency of Intel’s previous-generation silicon.

The company estimates that a laptop with a Core Ultra 200V processor can run productivity applications for up to 20.1 hours per charge. According to Intel, that amounts to a four-hour battery life edge over Advanced Micro Devices Inc.’s comparable chips. The Core Ultra 200V also promises to best the Snapdragon X Elite, Qualcomm Inc.’s flagship laptop processor, by about two hours. 

All nine chips in Intel’s new product line ship with an eight-core central processing unit. Four of the cores are optimized to maximize performance. The other four trade off some processing speed for increased efficiency.

The performance-optimized cores feature several improvements over Intel’s earlier hardware. The company has upgraded their TLB, a component that cores use to access CPU memory, as well as the onboard power management units. The latter modules now feature artificial intelligence software that monitors the cores and identifies moments when they can boost their speed without overheating. 

Compared with Intel’s earlier silicon, the CPU in the Core Ultra 200V series is also better at out-of-order execution. That’s a process through which a chip completes some computations before they’re needed by a program. Completing a calculation ahead of time makes the results available to applications sooner, which in turn speeds up processing.

The performance-optimized cores’ cache was also a major focus for Intel’s engineers. The speed at which a core can retrieve data from its cache is measured in terms of clock cycles: the fewer clock cycles the task takes, the sooner processing may begin. Compared with Intel’s previous-generation silicon, the amount of cache the cores can access in nine clock cycles or less has increased fivefold.

The chips in the Core Ultra 200V series ship with not only a CPU but also two other processing modules. There’s a graphics processing unit, as well as a neural processing unit optimized to run artificial intelligence models. Intel says that the latter module is four times faster than its previous-generation NPU.

The CPU, GPU and NPU are implemented on a piece of silicon called the compute tile. It’s attached to a platform controller tile that provides auxiliary features such as Wi-Fi support. The two tiles sit atop a third piece of silicon, the so-called interposer, that functions both as a base layer and as a network for moving data between the chip’s other components. 

The Core Ultra 200V’s core components are not produced at Intel fabs. The company is making the compute tile using Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.’s latest three-nanometer node. The platform controller tile, in turn, is based on TSMC’s earlier six-nanometer technology.

Intel says computer manufacturers have so far incorporated the Core Ultra 200V series into more than 80 laptop designs. The chipmaker expects the devices to start shipping on Sept. 24. All laptops powered by the new processor series will support Microsoft Corp.’s Copilot+ PC standard, which gives Windows computers that meet certain technical criteria access to an array of artificial intelligence features. 

Image: Intel