Intel is unveiling its new 14th generation Meteor Lake CPUs to the world at Computex in Taiwan this week, and as expected, generative AI like ChatGPT is the buzzword for everyone.

This new 4-nanometer Meteor Lake chip is smaller and more powerful than its predecessors, such as Intel's 7-nanometer Raptor Lake 13th generation CPUs announced in late 2022. It also includes a new component called VPU, which Intel claims will help Meteor Lake chips perform better on AI workloads.

With this all-new CPU/VPU/GPU design, Intel is betting that the 14th generation Meteor Lake CPUs will stand out from the pack, delivering top-class performance and power efficiency in the best laptops on the market. More importantly, by offloading AI workloads to the VPUs, they are freeing up the rest of the chip for performance gains and making a big push for relevance by touting Meteor Lake's ability to chew AI workloads.

This is an ambitious and complex hype that cannot be verified until I test a Meteor Lake PC myself. But until that day arrives, here's what we know so far about Intel's new 14th generation Meteor Lake CPUs, how they work, and what they portend for the future of computing.

Intel has so far been rather cagey about when and how it will roll out its 14th generation Meteor Lake chips. So far, the only assurance we have heard from Intel is that Meteor Lake CPUs will begin shipping in late 2023.

We can try to narrow that down a bit with some speculation. Intel released the preceding 13th generation Raptor Lake in late October 2022, starting with a high-end desktop CPU and following it with a laptop chip. A year earlier, in late October, it also announced the 12th generation Alder Lake CPUS.

So while there has been no formal announcement from Intel yet, it seems likely that the company will stick to its practice of releasing new CPUs in the last quarter of the year, probably in late October. These new, smaller Meteor Lake chips will not be cheap, as Intel's first round of new CPUs typically cost between $300 and $600 (entry-level and top-level CPUs, respectively).

So far, we know very few details about what the specs of Intel's new Meteor Lake chips will look like; more will become clear as we get closer to their release, which is expected to be near the end of 2023.

What we do know is that Meteor Lake is Intel's first CPU manufactured on a 4-nanometer process. This means that it should have better performance and power efficiency than predecessors like Raptor Lake, which was manufactured on a 7-nanometer process.

It may be that Intel's new Meteor Lake CPUs will offer better performance than the amazing Apple M2 chip manufactured on a 5-nanometer process. The only way to find out for sure is to wait until a Meteor Lake laptop is brought in for testing.

Everyone is talking about AI these days, and Intel is jumping on the bandwagon with Meteor Lake and its new VPUs. The amount of computing power required to do things like dynamic noise suppression in video calls has increased significantly in recent years.

Intel argued that PC users should expect more and more AI workloads to be processed locally on the PC rather than online by remote servers. This is in addition to the current CPU demand for machine learning tricks like blurring backgrounds in video calls, and with Microsoft's new Windows Copilot adding assistants like ChatGPT to Windows 11, Intel expects more similar on our PCs in the coming years Makes sense given that they are betting that apps will appear.

That's where VPUs come in, Intel's new VPUs in Meteor Lake CPUs, which are deployed alongside the CPU and GPU on the Meteor Lake SoC (system-on-chip) and are specialized to handle persistent AI workloads at low power The VPUs are designed to be used in a variety of applications, including VPUs can handle these tasks more efficiently than CPUs, allowing CPUs to do other work.

Intel claimed in its press presentation slides that the new VPU technology allows Meteor Lake chips to do more with less power. In Windows Studio Effects, for example, the addition of VPUs allows for advanced tricks such as gesture recognition and improved fidelity of dynamic blur effects.

Intel is also pushing the technology in applications like Audacity, Gimp, OBS, and the Unreal Engine. For example, in the latest version of the Unreal Engine, Intel claims that the Meteor Lake chip offloads AI workloads to the VPU, allowing the chip's onboard GPU to focus on rendering workloads, thereby improving real-time motion capture performance The company claims that it can.

Say goodbye to the Iris Xe GPUs integrated in previous Intel processors. Intel is changing things up with Meteor Lake, which will feature a new Arc integrated graphics chipset on its chips.

Yes, this is the Arc, the new Intel Arc discrete graphics card that will hit the market in 2022. As a result, Meteor Lake chips will have onboard low-power Arc graphics chiplets that support DX12 Ultimate, ray tracing, supersampling, and more.

While switching to Arc for onboard graphics is not likely to allow Meteor Lake owners to enjoy top-class gaming performance without a discrete GPU, playing games on the best Windows laptops performance and power efficiency could be broadly improved.

Intel's new Meteor Lake CPUs seem to bring not only the usual improvements in speed and power efficiency we expect from new chips, but also a seismic shift in the way we think about chip design.

This is because Intel is betting its next chip family on the promise that the current AI boom will not be a one-off. The company is moving away from its usual focus on price, performance, and power efficiency, touting Meteor Lake as a CPU designed for the future of AI-centric computing.

This is an exciting sales pitch, but it assumes a lot of buy-in and support from clients and partners who design applications that take advantage of Meteor Lake's new VPUs. It will be some time before we see if this AI-centric approach to chip design has a meaningful impact on key performance metrics such as battery life and gaming performance in laptops.

Sadly, it will be a while before we get a chance to test the Meteor Lake PC ourselves. Stay tuned.