Intel Core Ultra 200V Chips Will Boost Laptop Performance and Battery Life

Intel revealed a new generation of laptop processors today, aiming to be more competitive with ARM-based Snapdragon PCs and MacBooks, while delivering faster local AI performance. Meet the Intel Core Ultra 200V series.

Intel revealed its first Core Ultra processors late last year (and it took a few months to show up in laptops), also known as the “Meteor Lake” chips, which delivered faster performance and improved battery efficiency using the new Intel 4 fabrication process. The chips were a step in the right direction, but Intel was still playing catch-up to the power efficiency offered by Apple Silicon chips used in newer MacBooks. Since then, laptops with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite chips have started rolling out, which trade some x86 software compatibility for all-day battery life.

Intel has now responded with another generational update to its laptop chips: the Intel Core Ultra 200V series. The new mobile processors have “up to 3x the performance per thread” and “up to 80% peak performance uplift” compared to the initial Core Ultra chips. The chips also use Intel’s new X2 graphics microarchitecture, with a “30% average performance” boost. We’ll have to wait and see if those claims hold up in real-world testing.

Intel said in a press release, “The new processors deliver efficient and exceptional core performance through fine-tuned power management, completely rearchitected Performance-cores (P-core) optimized for performance per power per area. And Intel’s most powerful Efficient-cores (E-cores) to date are now able to contain more workloads, ensuring cool and quiet performance.”

The main attraction here is, as you might guess, local AI processing. The new chips have up to 120 TOPS (tera operations per second) across the CPU, GPU, and neural processing unit, allowing machine learning and AI tasks to run more efficiently. That will enable Windows features like Live Captions with translation, Windows Studio Effects like camera background blur and automatic framing, and Cocreator AI art generation in Paint. Recall will also be available on the new hardware, once Microsoft is done reworking it.

PC manufacturers have started announcing new laptops with the Core Ultra 200V chips, like the new Dell XPS 13, Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro 360, and LG Gram. There will be plenty more laptops with the new hardware coming over the next few months.

Source: Intel