Intel is gathering developers at the Intel Innovation Event in San Jose this week, and as part of the event, the company is teasing a few details about its upcoming 14th generation Meteor Lake chips.

The biggest news is that the first chips in the new Intel Meteor Lake lineup will arrive on December 14, and they will be Intel Core Ultra CPUs and will likely be the most powerful and expensive chips in the lineup.

The "Ultra" name is a new premium brand that Intel rolled out earlier this year in advance of the launch of Meteor Lake, and this change suggests that Intel intends to simplify the CPU line into two tiers-Core and Core Ultra- starting with these new chips

This change makes it seem as if Intel is trying to simplify its CPU line into two tiers - Core and Core Ultra - starting with these new chips.

As part of this change, the company is also ditching the i in front of the generation number and CPU model number, so what was once called the "14th generation Meteor Lake Core i5 CPU" will now be branded by Intel as "Meteor Lake Core 5 CPU" .

Intel is talking about this and other big changes to the chip this week at Intel Innovation, where generative AI like ChatGPT is sure to be a popular topic. Intel is capitalizing on the surge in popularity of this type of machine learning by touting the new VPU capabilities on its Meteor Lake chips.

These new Meteor Lake chips are not discrete chips of silicon, but are made in smaller, self-contained "chiplets" that are tightly linked in a way intended to make them more powerful and efficient than a single slice of silicon, and thus more accurately referred to as chiplets.

Intel's Meteor Lake CPUs are the company's first CPUs to use the chiplet-style design that competitor AMD has been using in its CPUs for years. These new 4-nanometer Meteor Lake chiplets are smaller (and thus expected to be more capable and efficient) than Intel's 7-nanometer Raptor Lake 13th generation CPUs announced in late 2022. It is also smaller than the astounding Apple M2 chip made on a 5-nanometer process.

Intel is betting that this all-new CPU/VPU/GPU chiplet design will set the 14th generation Meteor Lake CPUs apart from the pack, delivering top-class performance and power efficiency in the best laptops on the market. The new Meteor Lake chiplet GPU slice also builds on the technology pioneered by the company's Intel Arc graphics cards, which will bear the Arc brand, and could offer a new level of graphics excellence.

Intel is touting how these new chips will revolutionize computing this week in San Jose, and I'm sure by the time the Meteor Lake chips arrive later this year, your laptop or desktop will have the ability I thought it might be interesting to take a look at some of the biggest claims Intel is making in order to get an idea of what it will be like.

According to Intel, the new VPUs in the Meteor Lake chips are the biggest draw, as having a stack of silicon dedicated to machine learning and other tasks that fall under the umbrella of "AI" on the CPU should offer a number of small but important advantages.

For example, in a press presentation attended by Tom's Guide, an Intel representative claimed that the amount of compute power required for things like dynamic noise suppression in video calls has increased significantly over the last few years. While this work is typically done by the CPU, Intel claims that Meteor Lake chips run more snappily and are better at tasks such as dynamic noise suppression during calls because the VPU can handle these tasks more efficiently than the CPU, while freeing up the CPU for other tasks.

In other words, the CPU is more efficient than the CPU.

In other words, laptops should be able to do more with less effort, run smoother, and consume less power (more on this later). Also, VPUs in Meteor Lake chiplets may enable more complex and intricate processing tasks. In Windows Studio Effects, for example, Intel claims that the new Meteor Lake VPU will enable advanced tricks such as gesture recognition and improved fidelity of dynamic blur effects.

Say goodbye to the Iris Xe GPU integrated in previous Intel processors. Intel is changing things up with Meteor Lake and will include a new Arc integrated graphics chipset in its chips.

This is potentially exciting because whatever Intel is doing with the GPUs in the new Meteor Lake CPUs is based on what it has learned from making graphics cards.

In other words, when Meteor Lake chips start showing up in laptops in 2024, inside will be a small Arc graphics chiplet that supports major gaming technologies such as DX12 Ultimate, ray tracing, supersampling, etc.

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So should we expect to be playing Cyberpunk 2077 next year on a £2 Windows 11 ultra-portable with a Meteor Lake chip and full ray tracing at maximum settings? I think not. [I can't wait to see how these low-level improvements show up in games old and new once the Meteor Lake chips start hitting the market.

It may seem like a minor detail, but if you take your laptop to work or school every day, battery life is a huge issue. One of the reasons we independently test how long a laptop will last on a full charge every time we review it is because battery life is important.

That's why it's exciting to hear about what Intel has done to apply the strengths of the VPUs in the new Meteor Lake chips to optimize battery life. The company claims that the VPU integration will give Meteor Lake laptops a whole new way to intelligently monitor, predict, and adjust power usage based on personal preferences.

How good this is remains to be seen until we see how it is implemented in Windows, but what Intel is promising sounds pretty exciting. Basically, since the Meteor Lake chips are designed to intelligently integrate VPUs into the process, Intel has figured out how to monitor laptop usage and shift laptop power in real time.

In short, Intel claims that future laptops will have better battery life because they will use AI to learn how to best allocate power to support you throughout the day. If it really works, we may soon see a lot of Windows machines on the list of laptops with the longest battery life.

Intel's next CPU, Meteor Lake, is going to be a big story, fundamentally changing the way we think about Intel chips and laptop CPUs in general.

By simplifying the branding to Core/Core Ultra and using "AI" as a catch-all buzzword for what the new VPUs will do, Intel is clearly trying to make its Meteor Lake lineup look stylish and relevant. This is because despite Microsoft's new Windows Copilot adding ChatGPT-like assistants to Windows 11, every tech company seems to be going after Bing with ChatGPT in the AI tech market.

But as we are learning this week at Intel Innovation, there are many promising ways these new chips might reshape computing as we understand it. For now, it's all hype and marketing, but once we get some chips for testing, we'll see what a difference these new Meteor Lake chips will make in the performance department. Stay tuned.