presents its first processors for desktop PCs with AI

Few industries have changed as much in 2024 as personal computers. The arrival of Copilot+ PCs, with AI functions executed locally using new processors, represented a revolution in a market that needed it. Qualcomm’s new laptop processors and AMD’s new Zen 5 have managed to improve computer sales. It is therefore still strange that the benchmark of the sector until now, Intel, has gone somewhat unnoticed until now.

Nobody knows that this revolution has taken Intel on the wrong foot, but today the company wants to find its rhythm and become a leader again with its new Core Ultra 200S processors: the brand’s first with AI designed for desktop computers. However, before you buy a new motherboard (the LGA 1700 socket has been removed), you need to know a few details about these new chips.

Although we’ve already seen plenty of NPU-equipped laptop processors, Intel wants to get ahead of AMD (and possibly Qualcomm) with this desktop launch. Unfortunately, it is obvious that this technology is not yet considered essential in the desktop sector, because the NPU of these new Core Ultra 200S only reaches 13 TOPS

Therefore, the computer we build with these processors will not be recognized as a Copilot+ PC and you won’t have access to Windows 11’s new AI features. Intel says it could have included a 40 TOPS NPU, the minimum needed for Copilot+, but decided not to make the sacrifices that were necessary: ​​reduce the number of cores to include a larger and more powerful NPU.

This isn’t the only disappointment we might encounter, especially if we wanted to build a computer for video games; Performance hasn’t been Intel’s priority during this generation, and the company itself recognizes this. In tests published by Intel, the Intel Core Ultra 200S are worse than last generation processors in various games, like F1 24 o Far cry 6; the company had to search through old games like F1 23 o Civilization VI to show improvements over its previous processors.

Otherwise, the results promise the same performance in most games, so it’s worth asking whether it’s really worth upgrading, especially once experts have done independent comparisons with AMD processors. On the one hand, it’s refreshing that a company is honest and doesn’t “inflate” results like others have done; but on the other hand it seems to be a generation that players will be able to skip.

Intel has an ace up its sleeve: energy efficiency. The company claims it became the leader in energy efficiency overnight; the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K, the most powerful model, consumes half the energy than the latest generation Core i9-14900K, with the same performance. Some numbers are truly surprising, with a difference of up to 165W in games like Space Marines 2. This will also result in much lower temperatures, up to 17 degrees cooler, and therefore the fans of our computers will have to work less and make less noise.

In other words, let’s save on the electricity bill with these processors, although it is unlikely that this will be able to convince enthusiasts, who have never had problems buying a more powerful power supply and a more complete cooling system.

Gamers may not be the target audience for these processors, but the ones who will be very happy are content creators and users of productivity programs, for whom Intel promises notable improvements over the last generation and products AMD. Multi-core performance, in particular, is astonishingwith improvements of up to 30% in some tests, which should result in the possibility of using more demanding programs at the same time. And in this case we will appreciate the greater energy efficiency.

The importance of this launch for Intel is beyond anything, being the first manufactured using TSMC’s N3B process, and also the first to say goodbye to Hyper-Threading on the desktop. This technology, released in 2002, allows another thread to be processed during the time when a core is not operational because it has already finished with the previous thread. In practice this has been defined as twice the number of threads compared to cores (8 cores and 16 threads, etc.). It ends with this generation, which has the same number of threads as cores, but Intel justifies the change with savings in power consumption.

All these changes explain the new processor nomenclature. We say goodbye to the i9, i7 or i5and the models are now separated by the designation Ultra with a number and the model number. The flagship model is the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K, with 24 cores, of which 8 are performance cores (P) at a maximum of 5.7 GHz and the rest are efficiency cores (E).

Euro pricing for the Intel Core Ultra 200S has yet to be confirmed, but in the US the top-end model starts at $589. Several manufacturers like Asus have already confirmed that they will release motherboards with the new 800 chipset supporting WiFi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3 and Thunderbolt 4.