Intel's Arrow Lake-H has been put through its paces by hardware sleuth Golden Pig Upgrade Pack in his latest review at Bilibili. The tested models include the 16-core Core Ultra 9 285H and the 14-core Core Ultra 5 225H, though most of the spotlight is on the flagship variant.

Arrow Lake-H differs slightly from its desktop counterpart because it brings back LPE cores. Since Intel didn't offer much clarification, we aren't sure whether these cores are based on Skymont or Crestmont. In the latter case, Arrow Lake-H likely reuses the SoC Tile from Meteor Lake-H, but let's not jump to conclusions. The P and E cores employ the Lion Cove and Skymont architectures, respectively, cutting off Hyper-Threading.

The Core Ultra 9 285H offers 16 cores (six P-cores + eight E-cores + two LPE-cores) and 16 threads with a turbo clock of 5.4 GHz. The more mainstream-oriented 225H drops to 14 cores (four P-cores + eight E-cores + two LPE-cores), featuring a still-impressive 4.9 GHz turbo frequency. These processors have been compared against the Ryzen AI 9 365 packed with 10 cores (four Zen 5 + six Zen 5c) / 20 threads, and the high-end Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 leading the pack with 12 cores (four Zen 5 + eight Zen 5c) and 24 threads.

The shared images suggest this review was conducted on Lenovo's most recent IdeaPad series outfitted with Arrow Lake. Jumping into the benchmarks, the Core Ultra 9 285H surges ahead of the Cinebench R23 and R24 competition. In the single-core test, the 285H leads its predecessor by 13% with an impressive 26% uplift moving over to multi-core performance. However, all that glitters is not gold, and glancing at the efficiency slide doesn't paint a rosy picture for the 285H.

Limited to just 50W of power, Intel's Arrow Lake-H flagship fails to overtake the Ryzen AI 9 365 and considerably trails the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370. This is quite interesting as desktop Arrow Lake was much faster than Zen 5 in power-limited scenarios. The lackluster efficiency display could be attributed to the testing conditions or the supposedly older SoC Tile, but that's just a guess.

Arrow Lake-H's integrated GPU (iGPU) is based on a modified version of Alchemist with XMX cores. With that in mind, Intel has significantly improved 3DMark's testing suite. The most considerable uplift comes in ray tracing, where Arrow Lake leads Meteor Lake by almost 88%.

The same cannot be said for games where AMD's Radeon 880M is consistently ahead, and by some margin. Here, Alchemist+ yields little to no benefit over standard Alchemist. Funnily enough, Xe2 on Lunar Lake is the polar opposite as it struggles in synthetics but has managed to solidify its position as the fastest gaming iGPU, beating even the Radeon 890M.

After the switch to a disaggregated design, Intel will probably be leveraging the same CPU Tile from the desktop for Arrow Lake-H on mobile. This was an interesting faceoff, but it raises several questions, especially regarding efficiency. Intel didn't specifically discuss Arrow Lake-H's architecture at its keynote, so we can only guess now.

The beans have been spilled regarding Intel's Core 200 family of CPUs as data aggregator momomo_us has detailed the entire family across a series of tweets at X. The data misses out on key specifications such as core counts, but most of that information has been covered in the past. On that note, the leak includes retail ordering codes suggesting that these CPUs are already in the hands of OEMs as they ready their upcoming laptops.

To recap, Intel's Core 200 CPUs are divided into Ultra and non-Ultra SKUs. The Core 200 non-Ultra family will arrive as Raptor Lake refresh on budget laptops, akin to current-gen Core 100 offerings. Similarly, Core 200 Ultra CPUs get the latest Arrow Lake architecture - divided across the H and HX suffixes. Word of caution; the Core Ultra 200U processors are actually rumored to be a refresh of Meteor Lake rather than Arrow Lake, ported to Intel 3. It gets even more confusing as leaks allege the Core 200H family might incorporate LPE cores; absent from desktop Arrow Lake-S and flagship-grade mobile Arrow Lake-HX CPUs.

On the graphical side of things, Core Ultra 200 H/HX CPUs will employ the new Xe-LPG+ (Alchemist+) architecture with XMX cores, however, the Core Ultra 200U series is expected to stick with Xe-LPG as it is based on Meteor Lake - so you won't be able to use Intel's latest XeSS Frame Generation technology with these processors.

With those nuances aside, today's leak completes the puzzle of Intel's Core 200 lineup as we gaze upon the list of 22 upcoming mobile processors from Intel. We've decided to include the already-leaked HX series to give you a clearer picture.

Given the large variations between each suffix - going beyond simple core count and clock speed differences - users must exercise great caution when choosing a laptop next year. And it's not just Intel, AMD is also adjusting its existing offerings by re-releasing them under the new "Ryzen AI 300" branding.

Nonetheless, we expect all these processors to be announced at CES next month alongside budget 65W and 35W Arrow Lake processors. AMD will also roll out the Ryzen Z2 series, Krackan Point, and Strix Halo, side by side with its next-gen RDNA 4 Radeon RX 8000 GPUs. Laptops equipped with these processors should see availability in the following weeks.

Some purported specifications of Intel's upcoming Core Ultra 200U or Arrow Lake-U mobile processors have been surfaced by Jaykihn at X. It turns out that despite the "Ultra" moniker; the Core Ultra 200U CPUs will utilize an updated version of the Meteor Lake architecture - reportedly using the Intel 3 node.

We double-checked and it turns out that Intel's naming scheme gets more confusing with each new launch. Arrow Lake-U is designated for thin and light laptops - with TDPs ranging between 12W, 15W, and 28W. The non-Ultra counterparts (Core 200U) are still based on Alder Lake silicon. These CPUs feature P-cores and E-cores using the Redwood Cove+ and Crestmont Enhanced microarchitectures respectively, in contrast to Lion Cove and Skymont on Arrow Lake chips. Meteor Lake or the Core Ultra 100 series was powered by the same architecture under the hood hence saying that Team Blue is porting Meteor Lake to Intel 3 isn't far off the mark. This is likely due to costs, as TSMC's N3B node doesn't come in cheap - but that's just speculation.

Going over the specifications, the Arrow Lake-U family leak describes four different flavors: Core Ultra 7 265U, Core Ultra 7 255U, Core Ultra 5 235U, and the Core Ultra 5 225U. The flagship 265U hosts 12 cores (two P + eight E + two LPE) and 14 threads alongside 12MB of L3 cache - boosting up to 5.3 GHz across one or two performance cores. The remaining three SKUs retain similar core counts, L3 cache, and Xe cores but see a drop in clock speeds, if this data is genuine and correct.

The leaker reports in the same thread that the iGPU (Integrated GPU) is based on Xe-LPG (Arc Alchemist) and not Xe-LPG+ (Alchemist+) like all other Arrow Lake processors; Arrow Lake-U thus probably reuses Meteor Lake's GPU Tile. Based on the specifications we can infer that all tiles except for the Compute Tile are similar to those featured in Meteor Lake. However, we'll wait for an official confirmation from Intel.

• Core Ultra 200S - Arrow Lake Desktop
• Core Ultra 200V - Lunar Lake
• Core Ultra 200H/HX - Arrow Lake Mobile
• Core Ultra 200U - Meteor Lake Refresh Mobile
• Core 200U/H - Alder Lake / Raptor Lake Mobile

Such a change is potentially misleading, as customers might naturally assume that anything with the Core "Ultra" 200 tag slapped on it will be based on Arrow Lake but that's not the case here. It is probably fair to say that users should exercise great caution when purchasing a laptop next year as both Intel and AMD are constantly rolling out new chips under frequently changing naming schemes. Nonetheless, we expect these processors to be announced at CES 2025 alongside other Core Ultra 200H/HX/T/non-K processors.

We last took an in-depth look at integrated graphics performance four years ago, using a combination of desktop and laptop hardware. Things have changed a lot in the intervening years, and while no one is going to replace a high-end GPU with an integrated solution any time soon, budget gaming solutions are clearly in sight. Perhaps that's why we haven't really seen any true budget GPU solutions from Nvidia for several years, with the least expensive models often adding several hundred dollars to the price of a PC or laptop.

With Intel's Lunar Lake and AMD's Ryzen AI mobile processors now launched, it's time for a rematch. We've got three roughly equivalent laptops for testing, all from Asus (via AMD and Intel). The newest is the Asus Zenbook S14, equipped with a Core Ultra 7 258V processor and Arc Graphics 140V (aka Lunar Lake or LNL). It's mostly the same chassis as the previous generation Asus Zenbook OLED 14, which has a Core Ultra 7 155H and Arc Graphics (aka Meteor Lake or MTL). And from the AMD camp, we have the larger Asus Zenbook S16 with a Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 processor with an Radeon 890M GPU (aka Strix Point).

We did some preliminary benchmarks last month, showing how Lunar Lake's graphics fared against the other options. But after both user and vendor feedback, we felt a deeper comparison was in order. Also, Intel has updated drivers for Lunar Lake that improve the situation (though they're still not on a unified driver version). This time, we're going whole hog with a selection of 24 games, including many recent releases.

We're interested in both performance and compatibility, and have notified the appropriate companies of any issues we encountered (which means we told Intel one of the games we tested is borked). We also took steps to ensure a level playing field, as much as possible. That means — and this is an absolutely critical point — that we are not using things like FSR 1/2/3, frame generation, XeSS, HYPR-RX, AFMF2, or any other proprietary technologies. Because we know, from experience, that even if XeSS and FSR2 can run on GPUs from the other vendors, they don't necessarily run optimally.

We're looking at the underlying GPU performance, at native resolution, plain and simple. Is that "fair?" And what does fair even mean? We think it's best to level the playing field without bringing in outside software solutions for a primary performance comparison, but AMD is proud of HYPR-RX, AFMF, FSR, and its other technologies and has a blog post that coincidentally also went up this morning, where AMD claims a 75% lead over Intel's 258V — with both sides using all the software tweaks available. (On a related note, this is precisely why we haven't been testing with DLSS in every game where it's an option on our desktop GPU reviews for the past six years.)

We also ensured that all three laptops have a CPU package power of around 28W — though Intel's Lunar Lake has DRAM on package, which draws about 1.5W of power, so technically it's at a slight disadvantage... but it also has faster LPDDR5x-8533 memory, which certainly helps in some of the games we tested.

And finally, for good measure, we ran the same tests on an older Dell G15 laptop that has a Core i5-12500H and an RTX 3050 Ti 4GB dedicated graphics card — which, for the record, was also tested without using DLSS. We expect the dGPU to be faster, but we wanted to see how much of a gap exists between a relatively-budget gaming laptop and these newer integrated GPUs. It's definitely not an apples-to-apples matchup, however, as the G15 comes with a single DDR5-4800 8GB stick of RAM, and that doesn't do it any favors. Consider it a point of reference rather than a definitive statement on the RTX 3050 Ti or any other dedicated GPU.

Testing Overview

Before we get to the test results, let's also quickly discuss the high level specs of the various laptops. These are, more or less, the top three integrated graphics solutions from AMD and Intel for the current and previous (Meteor Lake) laptop processors. While AMD's chip is the Ryzen AI 9, we've found little difference between Intel's Core Ultra 9 288V and the 'slower' Core Ultra 7 258V — there's even a performance deficit for the higher tier processor in some cases.

Starting with Lunar Lake, it's clear Intel set out to do something quite different from its previous architectures. On the CPU front, there are four Lion Cove P-cores (performance optimized cores), without Hyper-Threading Then there are four Skymont E-cores (efficiency optimized cores), also without Hyper-Threading. That gives eight CPU cores with eight threads total, which represents a sizeable step down from the up to 16 cores and 22 threads of the prior generation.

On the GPU side of things, Lunar Lake has a second generation 'Battlemage' Xe2 architecture chip, with eight Xe-cores and 1,024 shader ALUs (Arithmetic Logic Units) — as well as full XMX support. Architectural differences mean that real-world performance will be better, but theoretical performance lands at 4.0 teraflops for FP32 and 67 teraflops of FP16 for AI workloads. There's a new NPU (Neural Processing Unit) for AI as well that provides 48 TOPS of INT8 computational power.

Intel tapped TSMC for the most of the processor, using the cutting edge N3B node for the compute tile (CPU, GPU, NPU, and cache) and the older N6 node for the platform tile (memory controller, PCIe, USB, and other functionality). These reside on a Foveros tile that's made using Intel's older (2012) 22nm FinFET node.

Next up is the prior generation Meteor Lake laptop in the form of the Asus Zenbook 14 OLED. It's quite a different beast from new Lunar Lake, with four different tiles. Technically, it's not the first tiled architecture from Intel — that would be the short-lived Lakefield architecture in 2020. But after that initial debut and apparently proof of concept, Meteor Lake was the true coming out party for Foveros chip stacking.

The compute tile houses the CPU cores and is made on Intel's own Intel 4 node. It houses the six Redwood Cove P-cores and eight Crestmont E-cores, plus associated caches and sundry other pieces. There are two additional low power E-cores on the SOC tile, which is made using TSMC's N6 node. That's 16 cores and 22 threads of CPU, though do note that the LP E-cores run at significantly lower clocks. Two of the P-cores are also higher performance cores that can hit higher clocks.

The GPU uses the TSMC N5 node, with eight Xe-cores based on the Alchemist architecture. However, unlike the dedicated desktop and laptop Arc GPUs, Meteor Lake's GPU lacks the XMX units (matrix/vector units that help accelerate AI workloads). With clocks of up to 2250 MHz, however, it has a theoretical rating of 4.6 teraflops FP32 — higher than Lunar Lake's GPU! We'll see in the benchmarks that architectural upgrades ultimately make Battlemage the faster part, which hopefully means good things for the upcoming dedicated Battlemage GPUs.

The SOC tile also contains Intel's first generation NPU, which offers a relatively tame 10 TOPS of INT8 compute — not enough for Microsoft's Copilot+ certification. There's also an IO tile for things like PCIe, WiFi, USB, and more that's made on TSMC N6.

Compared to both Lunar Lake and Meteor Lake, AMD's Strix Point architecture is far more traditional. It's a single monolithic die, manufactured on TSMC N4P — basically a refinement of the N5 node that's better tuned for higher performance (read: clocks). That means, on the whole, AMD's chip lands between Lunar Lake's compute tile and IO tile and ahead of Meteor Lake, at least on paper.

The CPU consists of four full performance Zen 5 cores, plus eight more Zen 5c density optimized cores. All the cores support the same instruction set and features, but the Zen 5 cores can clock much higher. All told, that's 12 cores and 24 threads for the CPU.

The GPU uses AMD's efficiency optimized RDNA 3.5 architecture, with some tweaks specifically intended to help with performance. It has 16 compute units (CUs), for 1,024 shader ALUs total — the same number as both Intel GPUs. It has a maximum boost clock of 2900 MHz, giving a potential 5.9 teraflops of FP32 compute, but in practice we measured much lower real-world clocks ranging between 1.8~2.2 GHz (3.7~4.5 teraflops).

Strix Point also has an NPU rated at 50 TOPS of INT8, which makes it the most performant of the three NPUs in theory. Both Lunar Lake and Strix Point are certified for Microsoft's Copilot+ features, if that's something you care about.

And as noted, we have an older gaming laptop, the budget-friendly Dell G15 (5520) that came out in 2022. You can get an updated and better-equipped Dell G15 starting at $799 today, but the model we had on hand for testing has an RTX 3050 Ti. We wanted that specifically, or the RTX 3050, just to see how a budget dedicated RTX GPU stands up to the latest integrated solutions.

As mentioned earlier, this particular unit has a single 8GB DDR5-4800 SO-DIMM, which also potentially hinders performance. The lack of RAM likely also was to blame for one of the games (The Last of Us, Part 1) refusing to run, though it might have also been the 4GB of VRAM.

Integrated graphics 720p and 1080p gaming performance

We have 24 different games that we've elected to test, and we even went so far as to enable ray tracing (DXR, aka DirectX Raytracing) in three of the games. That... did not go very well, as you'll see in the results. Everything else was run at low or medium settings, depending on whether the game in question could achieve reasonable levels of performance.

We tested at both 720p and 1080p, without any upscaling or frame generation. We're not opposed to people using those features, particularly on low-end hardware — and AMD offers driver-side AMD Fluid Motion Frames 2 (AFMF2) frame generation to potentially improve the experience. But for the apples to apples benchmarks, we wanted to render at native resolution to see how the laptops fare.

All three Asus laptops have different fan profiles, which also determine power and performance to a large degree. We used the "Performance" profile on the Strix Point and Meteor Lake laptops, which allows for 28W of power to the CPU package. On the Lunar Lake laptop, the same "Performance" profile only gives the chip 24W of headroom, so we opted for the "Full Speed" profile that bumps it up to the same 28W TDP. Basically, we're trying to be as fair as possible, though it's impossible to truly make everything identical — motherboard and BIOS firmware being one key point of differentiation, not to mention memory speeds.

Speaking of which, the three laptops all have 32GB of dual-channel LPDDR5x memory. That's good, though the Meteor Lake and Strix Point 'only' have 7500 MT/s memory while Lunar Lake gets 8533 MT/s DRAM. The DRAM is part of the Lunar Lake package, an expensive one-off decision apparently, and Intel elected to use higher speed memory on all of the chips.

We use FrameView to capture frametimes in each game, and it also captures CPU package power (and GPU power if there's a dedicated GPU), CPU and GPU clocks, and some other metrics that we'll share below. Every test gets run at least three times, with the first result being discarded, to ensure consistency.

For testing, we used the latest Intel 6130 (Meteor Lake) / 6048 (Lunar Lake) drivers — it's a single driver package released at the end of October. For AMD, we're using the latest 24.10.1 drivers. All three laptops are running Windows 11 24H2 (though the Dell G15 is still on 23H2, and was tested with the 566.03 drivers).

Starting with the overall geometric mean — which gives equal weight to every performance result — the standings have Intel's latest Arc 140V iGPU in the top position, leading AMD's Radeon 890M by 7% at 720p and 5% at 1080p. The sheer number of games used for testing means that no single title has too much of an impact, and as we'll see in our individual results below, Intel routinely comes out on top.

Lunar Lake also provides a big improvement in gaming performance compared to Meteor Lake: 42% at 720p and 32% at 1080p. It's interesting that the 1080p results, both with Strix Point and Meteor Lake, narrows, but it does make sense. Memory bandwidth becomes a bigger factor at higher resolutions, and while Lunar Lake does have more bandwidth — 136.5 GB/s compared to 120 GB/s — that's only 14% more bandwidth overall. We can't say exactly how much compute versus bandwidth factor into each individual result, but the 720p numbers do show that Lunar Lake has better graphics throughput in general.

But there's still a big gap, even when compared to a three years old RTX 3050 Ti that's held back by the 8GB of system RAM. Nvidia's budget GPU delivers 44% higher performance at 720p and 61% more performance at 1080p compared to Lunar Lake. Again, bandwidth looks to be a factor, and the 3050 Ti has 192 GB/s of dedicate memory bandwidth.

The individual results show a wide spread, and drivers are clearly an issue at times — and not solely for Intel. We'll discuss the specifics in each of the games below, in alphabetical order.

Assassin's Creed Mirage gives AMD's 890M the win, by 12% at 720p but only 3% at 1080p. Lunar Lake easily beats its predecessor, however, offering a 74% performance uplift at 720p and 62% at 1080p. The RTX 3050 Ti mostly matches the overall standings, with 47% higher 720p performance and a 65% higher 1080p result.

Avatar does support some ray tracing effects, though we wouldn't expect any of those to be active on the low preset. Lunar Lake and Strix Point are tied at 720p, while AMD has a 5% lead at 1080p. LNL also shows nearly a doubling in performance compared to MTL at 720p, and a 68% improvement at 1080p.

Baldur's Gate 3 is one of several games that didn't run all that great on any of the GPUs. AMD's Radeon 890M manages the best result of the iGPUs, but both old and new Intel GPUs have a "pulsing" effect — we provided an FPS over time chart in the above gallery to illustrate this. You get a fast-then-slow-then-fast repeated cycle that results in a very poor overall experience. This could potentially be related to VRAM use, as the RTX 3050 Ti and even AMD's GPU also have relatively poor 1% low FPS.

Black Myth: Wukong was one of the games we originally looked at, but we had FSR3 upscaling and framegen enabled and that messed with the results. Without any upscaling, the 258V manages 10% higher performance at 720p, but falls behind by 20% at 1080p. Intel's new chip shows 56% higher performance than the prior gen at 720p, but only 6% higher performance at 1080p.

Control (Ultimate Edition) is one of the three games where we also tested ray tracing performance. Without enabling RT, Intel's Arc 140V beats the Radeon 890M by 21% at 720p and 27% at 1080p. It's also 29% and 46% faster than the Arc Graphics in the 155H. With RT turned on (using the medium setting), it's 16% and 11% faster than AMD's iGPU, and likewise 16% and 6% faster than Meteor Lake.

We also enabled ray tracing in Cyberpunk 2077, which really didn't go so well for any of the iGPUs. Using traditional rasterization rendering, Lunar Lake delivers a solid 50 fps at 720p with medium settings, and 36 fps at 1080p, beating Strix Point by 3% and 22%, respectively. LNL is also 29% and 31% faster than MTL. 

With ray tracing enabled, Arc 140V ends up as the fastest of the three iGPUs, but only with 21 FPS at 720p and 10.5 fps at 1080p. AMD's 890M choked badly in our testing, failing to get into the double digits — one of the few cases (the DXR Control and Minecraft being the others) where AMD's newer chip performed worse than Intel's Meteor Lake.

Diablo IV isn't remotely demanding, as evidenced by the three iGPUs all clearing 60 fps at 720p, and even managing 48 FPS or higher at 1080p medium. There are some stutters, however, as evidenced by the 1% lows. But the game is easily playable on any of the three iGPUs. Intel LNL gets another 7%/17% lead over AMD at 720p/1080p, and a 21%/28% lead over MTL.

Dragon's Dogma 2 feels rather sluggish compared to many other games, and it doesn't even look that great. We ran around the city of Vernworth for our testing, and every GPU felt stuttery — including the RTX 3050 Ti. We can only assume that the game wants more than 4GB of VRAM, but in general it just feels pretty poorly optimized. AMD gets the win this time, with a 13% lead over Lunar Lake, which in turn beats Meteor Lake by 38%/35% (720p/1080p).

Dying Light 2 runs quite nicely on the three iGPUs and was playable even at 1080p medium on Lunar Lake — Meteor Lake was more borderline at that resolution. Intel gets the win again, leading by 14%/32% over AMD and 47%/45% over MTL.

AMD takes the pole position with F1 24, beating Arc 140V and Lunar Lake by 20%/10%. Intel's newer iGPU is still 40%/34% faster than Meteor Lake, however.

None of the iGPUs manages to run Final Fantasy XVI, using the default low preset, at anything approaching a playable level. Even the RTX 3050 Ti struggles, with minimums regularly falling below 20 fps at 720p. At 1080p, the fastest of the four laptops (Dell G15) only gets 16 FPS, while the slowest (MTL) gets 12 FPS. As we noted in our desktop testing of Final Fantasy XVI, the game feels extremely poorly optimized.

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 benefits from both high CPU as well as higher GPU performance, and despite only having eight cores, Lunar Lake delivers good performance overall. It's 17% faster than the Radeon 890M at 720p, but 2% slower at 1080p. Gen over gen, Lunar Lake beats Meteor Lake by 30% / 27%.

God of War: Ragnarok is another game where all three iGPUs have a difficult time, even at 720p using minimum (low) settings. The Arc 140V averages 42 FPS, but minimums fall into the low 20s, and it feels quite stuttery. Still, Intel gets the win over AMD by a relatively large 42% / 47% — we'd wager AMD needs to do some driver tuning here. Looking at the previous generation, Intel sees just over double the performance.

Hogwarts Legacy also has the occasional stutter, though this seems more endemic to the game engine than the GPU. Each system would 'stall' noticeably at a certain point in our run through the town of Hogsmeade, and we've seen the same thing with desktop GPUs. Intel's new mobile CPU gets top honors again, though, with a 27% / 11% lead over AMD's finest, and a 76% / 47% lead over the prior gen 155H.

Whether or not you think Horizon Forbidden West looks better than its predecessor, it's pretty demanding of the GPU, with minimums on all of our test laptops falling below 30 FPS. Arc Graphics 140V in the 258V comes out in first among iGPUs at 720p, leading AMD by 12%, but then it falls behind by 7% at 1080p. Gen on gen, Intel sees a 21% / 23% lead over Meteor Lake.

The Last of Us, Part 1, refused to run on the RTX 3050 Ti laptop, showing an "insufficient memory" error. We're not sure if that's purely from the 4GB of VRAM, or if it's the combination of VRAM and system RAM. As an AMD promoted game, it's no surprise to see the 890M leading Intel's iGPU by 18% / 8%. Intel only sees an 18%/11% lead over its prior generation part as well, one of the smaller margins.

MechWarrior 5 Clans uses Unreal Engine 5, and even at minimum settings, it's rough on lower tier GPUs. The RTX 3050 Ti has decent average FPS of 47, but minimums fall below 20 FPS with clear hitching and stuttering present. The 258V is manageable at 720p, beating AMD's part by 20% and the 155H by 51%. Moving up to 1080p, none of the laptops were really playable, though Lunar Lake still shows a 14% advantage over AMD and a 31% lead over Meteor Lake.

Without ray tracing turned on, Minecraft can run on pretty much anything and everything. It ends up CPU limited with the RTX 3050 Ti only drawing around 22W and with similar 720p and 1080p performance. It seems to be more single-threaded overall, which is why Lunar Lake ends up being the fastest iGPU at 1080p, with 31% higher FPS than Strix Point and a 60% gen-on-gen improvement over MTL.

Turning on ray tracing causes a massive hit to performance, and the 3050 Ti power use jumps to 87W. LNL ends up 31% / 34% faster than AMD's Strix Point, and 17% / 9% faster than MTL. It almost looks like Minecraft with DXR enabled on the Intel iGPUs ends up largely limited by memory bandwidth.

A Plague Tale: Requiem is one of the outliers as far as Lunar Lake goes, with performance basically unchanged compared to Meteor Lake. It looks like Intel could work on its drivers for this one, while AMD's 890M delivers a 40%/15% gutpunch to the Intel GPUs.

Spider-Man: Miles Morales is another game that likes both CPU performance as well as VRAM. The RTX 3050 Ti gets held back on both fronts with its older i5-12500H processor, barely outpacing the 258V at 720p though the gap grows at 1080p. Lunar Lake ranks again as the top iGPU with 12% / 15% better performance than AMD's Strix Point, and 37%/51% higher gen-on-gen performance.

Star Wars Outlaws is the sole game in our 24 game test suite that refused to run on Meteor Lake, and it also kept crashing on Lunar Lake. We got a result at 720p, though we wouldn't put too much stock in it until Intel fixes the drivers. There were also rendering errors on Lunar Lake, and Intel says it's aware of the problems. AMD's 890M didn't have any such trouble, delivering 22% higher performance, without crashing, compared to Intel's 140V GPU processor.

Starfield has AMD and Intel on equal footing, though neither provides a particularly great experience with average performance in our test sequence (on Akila) of just 33 FPS at 720p, and 24 FPS at 1080p — though Intel has slightly higher minimum FPS in both cases. LNL beats MTL by 95% / 80%, one of the larger difference between the old and new Intel GPUs.

Another recent release, and an AMD promoted game as well, Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 pretty much has Lunar Lake and Strix Point at parity, with AMD having a slight 6% lead at 1080p. LNL is 27%/16% faster than the previous gen MTL, however.

Last but not least, we have Witchfire, and indie game from some of the people that made Painkiller back in the aughts. Two of the studio's heads left People Can Fly to form The Astronauts in 2012, around the time the Epic acquired a stake in People Can Fly. The game uses Unreal Engine 4, so performance tends to be better than in UE5 games. AMD's Radeon 890M takes the top spot at both 720p and 1080p, beating Lunar Lake's 140V by 12%–13%. LNL in turn leads the previous generation Arc Graphics by 25% / 16%.

Total power use and GPU clocks

That takes care of the gaming performance, but let's also quickly discuss power use and GPU clocks, as the data is interesting. First up is power.

We mentioned how the laptops vary in power limits, and here you can see that the settings we used result in very similar power use from all three of the Zenbooks with integrated graphics. This data is from FrameView's total package power for the CPU, and includes around 1.5W extra for RAM on Lunar Lake, but otherwise across all 26–27 tests, the power use is very similar.

And then look at the gaming laptop, which uses 39.2W on average for the CPU, and 77.3W on average for the RTX 3050 Ti. We suspect that with a slightly different and newer graphics solution, like the RTX 4050 laptop GPU, performance would be improved thanks to the additional VRAM, and the CPU and system RAM might also hold back the 3050 Ti. But it's still interesting to see just how big the gap is between the iGPU solutions and the dedicated GPU.

Nvidia GPUs can also run in lower power modes, though we did some limited testing with a 30W power limit and found that performance dropped substantially in that case, with the 3050 Ti often falling below the fastest iGPU solution. There's a good reason we never liked the RTX 3050 or 3050 Ti laptop GPUs. Beating a newer iGPU doesn't require much performance, really.

And finally, here are the GPU clock speeds as reported by FrameView. What's interesting here is that, despite having a maximum 2900 MHz boost clock, AMD's Radeon 890M typically runs at speeds closer to 2000 MHz. That's the same speed, roughly, as Intel's Meteor Lake Arc Graphics.

Lunar Lake on the other hand clocks even lower, which emphasizes the architectural improvements that the Battlemage Xe2 architecture brings to the table. It averaged around 1850 MHz across our test suite, only 100 MHz below its maximum boost clock, and many of the games showed a 1950 MHz average clock speed.

Put another way, at real-world clocks, Lunar Lake's Arc 140V GPU has a theoretical 3.8 teraflops of graphics compute, Strix Point's Radeon 890M has a theoretical 4.1 teraflops, and Meteor Lake's Arc Graphics also offers a theoretical 4.1 teraflops. Looking at the actual resulting performance (and, for simplicity's sake, ignoring the difference in memory speeds), that means on a clock for clock basis, Battlemage as an iGPU currently delivers better overall efficiency in terms of gaming performance per teraflops.

We crunched the numbers, and we end up with Lunar Lake offering 10.33 FPS/TFLOPS across our test suite, Strix Point gives 9.05 FPS/TFLOPS, and Meteor Lake only offers 6.90 FPS/TFLOPS. That means, for our independent testing, Intel delivered exactly 50 percent higher performance per teraflops compared to its prior generation GPU.

Thoughts on integrated graphics in 2024

For a lot of people, integrated graphics will be the only thing on offer with many laptops. It's possible to do dedicated GPUs, but that results in thicker, heavier systems that often offer much worse battery life, make more noise, run hotter, and cost a lot more. Given those factors, I'd make the argument that if you're only intending on modest gaming on a laptop, and you have good internet (with no data cap), you'd be better off with a thin and light laptop and an Nvidia GeForce Now subscription.

Do the math: RTX 2080/3080 performance at 1440p60 for $10 per month, or an "RTX 4080 in the cloud" with up to 4K120 performance for $20 per month. Image fidelity via streaming isn't as good as locally rendered graphics, but on a laptop I'd be more than happy to get a virtual 4080 equivalent that can actually deliver solid performance at 1440p ultra settings.

Of course, now even paid subscribers are limited to 100 hours per month, but if that's enough for your needs, and like I said you have good internet? I've used GeForce Now enough to know that it's better than what you get with just about any laptop, for a fraction of the cost. But don't try using it on most hotel WiFi networks, or be prepared for disappointment.

Or if you just play lighter and/or older games, look at the Diablo IV results here for a sample of what that can be like: Modern integrated graphics solutions can absolutely handle lighter games, even at 1080p. Plenty of games exist where you don't need a gaming laptop at all, and the games shown here are decidedly more of the "heavy" variety, with only a few exceptions.

Secondarily, there's the question of where integrated graphics are going. Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, and Apple all offer baseline iGPUs with 1024 or 1280 shader ALUs right now. Apple is more than happy to double or quadruple that figure, with 2X to 4X the memory bandwidth as well, for a hefty price increase. Apple MacBook Pro users are willing to fork out for such a configuration, but Windows users have so far been less enamored with faster iGPUs.

But there are a lot of rumblings about AMD Strix Point Halo, which could double the memory interface to 256 bits and increase the CU count from 16 in Strix Point to 40 CUs. It would be, roughly speaking, AMD's equivalent of the Apple M4 Pro, with more compute but similar bandwidth. It would also be at least relatively similar to the PlayStation 5 GPU, but with less bandwidth. Is there a market for such a monster iGPU, running Windows? We'll find out, if or when AMD begins shipping Strix Point Halo.

As for Intel, Lunar Lake takes the podium for 'pure' Windows integrated graphics right now. It's not by a huge margin, and there are still a few driver issues that we encountered, but things are much better today than they were four years ago as far as gaming compatibility and performance are concerned. And as noted at the start, our testing was done without enabling any performance enhancing software, which mostly applies to AMD's GPU.

AMD rightly notes that FSR support is more widespread than XeSS. (DLSS is also more widespread than FSR and XeSS, but that's another story.) The reality is that using things like AFMF2, FSR, or various other approaches that change the rendered resolution or insert 'generated' frames represent a different workload. You can try all of those out on whatever laptop or desktop GPU you buy, and some can deliver a better gaming experience — because no matter how you slice it, 1080p medium at 20 fps isn't good.

Driver-side adjustments in particular fundamentally skew the workloads and open the door for all sorts of shenanigans, so at least for our primary performance testing, we're sticking to native rendering. We may however choose revisit all of our testing with various performance enhancers, which will be more of an experiential look at performance rather than discussing which GPU actually has more apparent horsepower.

Because, let's be frank: AMD still has better graphics drivers and software. Intel's hardware may have the performance advantage, but even though it was only one game that failed to run, there were other games (like Baldur's Gate 3) that also delivered a poor experience. We're more confident now than a few years back that Intel will continue to work on such driver issues, but we notified them of the Star Wars Outlaws and Baldur's Gate 3 issues a few weeks ago, and a fix still hasn't appeared.

Set aside the drivers and software, and Intel's latest iGPU looks good from the hardware standpoint. It shows some excellent efficiency and performance improvements over the previous Arc Alchemist GPUs, which is great to see and gives us hope for Intel Battlemage.

Except, there are rumors and leaks that suggest Battlemage desktop cards my only offer up to 24 Xe-cores. That means, with a 2.5 GHz clock as an estimate, such a GPU would offer 15.4 teraflops of compute. If correct, that would be roughly at the level of an RTX 4060 Ti, or a bit lower performance than an AMD RX 7700 XT. That's just a ballpark estimate and the final results remain to be seen, but we really hope Intel has something more in store with Battlemage than a 24 Xe-core solution.

Beyond that, we have Panther Lake coming next year, which could have an Intel Arc Celestial (Xe3) GPU. We're certain AMD will have more integrated RDNA 3.5 and RDNA 4 GPUs launching in the future as well. But for now, Lunar Lake currently claims the crown for being the fastest Windows PC integrated GPU.

Intel's upcoming Core Ultra 5 225H from the Arrow Lake-H mobile family has been tested at Geekbench (via Benchleaks), delivering moderate uplifts compared to its predecessor in the CPU and iGPU (OpenCL) departments. However, even this sizeable uplift is still insufficient to leapfrog Lunar Lake, which sits comfortably at the top of the table at much lower power limits.

The Core Ultra 5 225H is the successor to the Core Ultra 5 125H. It features 14 cores (four P + eight E + two LPE) and 14 threads alongside 18MB of L3 cache. The test bench is an upcoming notebook from Samsung—codenamed "NP965XHD"—offering 16GB of unspecified memory. Based on this test, the Core Ultra 5 225H clocked at a maximum of 4.9 GHz—roughly 9% faster than the Core Ultra 5 125H.

Starting with the CPU scores, the Core Ultra 5 225H amassed 2,547 points and 12,448 points in the single-core and multi-core tests, respectively. This lands it 14% faster in single-core performance than the 125H, though multi-core remains a disappointment at just 8% faster; that may be attributed to the lack of hyperthreading. Lunar Lake still takes the lead in single-core while consuming less power. The gap was more prominent with the previously leaked Core Ultra 9 285H, so these results probably do not indicate the final silicon.

Arrow Lake ships with Intel's upgraded Xe-LPG+ architecture with the Core Ultra 5 225H sporting the Arc 130T iGPU with 7 Xe cores (112 Xe Vector Engines) clocked at 2.2 GHz. Oddly enough, 7 Xe-LPG+ cores outperform 7 Xe2 cores (Core Ultra 5 228V), at least in OpenCL, a synthetic test.

To explain this, Lunar Lake operates at a lower TDP (17W - 37W) than Arrow Lake-H (expected to be 28W - 115W). Secondly, Lunar Lake offers faster gaming performance in practice than what theoretical benchmarks suggest, owing to architectural refinements and better drivers. Nonetheless, Core Ultra 5 225H's iGPU scores 16% better than its Meteor Lake equivalent. Real-world performance, however, will primarily be subject to driver support and game optimizations.

Intel will release the Core Ultra 200H/U/HX/non-K CPUs at CES 2025. Rumors allege that Battlemage will arrive ahead of RDNA 4 and Blackwell as early as next month.

The Khadas Mind 2 has just been released for public pre-order, with a starting price of $799. This tiny workstation comes with an Intel Core Ultra 5 125H processor, 16GB of RAM, and a 512GB M.2 2230 SSD. But if you prefer the higher-powered Intel Core Ultra 7 155H with 32GB of RAM and 1TB of storage, the price will jump to $1,099. The Khadas Mind 2 is the successor to the original Khadas Mind, which is powered by a 13th-gen Intel Core processor, and is still labeled as a portable workstation aimed at professionals.

In the above table we compare the new models to their equivalents in the Mind 2 range.

The Khadas Mind 2 is essentially the same as its predecessor, except for the better CPUs. Nevertheless, it retains the same $799 or $1,099 price, which makes it a better choice when compared to the first version. However, this price range is still steep, given that you can buy a pretty powerful gaming laptop at that price.

Of course, this single-board computer (SBC) isn’t targeted for solely at gamers. Instead, it’s built for those who work in limited spaces and want something relatively powerful that can fit inside their bag. And even though the only upgrade you can do on the Mind 2 is to add an extra SSD, Khadas makes extra modules for this tiny PC, allowing you to add functionality as needed.

These modules include the Mind Dock, which connects to the Mind and Mind 2 via a proprietary PCIe 5.0 connector called "Mind Link" which adds nine ports to the small device, and the Mind Graphics, which gives you an 8GB or 16GB RTX 4060 Ti desktop GPU, called the "Khadas Mind Graphics" which we have already reviewed with the previous generation's i7 model. Khadas also has plans for additional modules, like the Mind xPlay, which will turn the Mind and Mind 2 into a full-fledged laptop. This isn't a new feature, it was announced in 2023 along with the previous generation of Khadas Mind.

The Mind 2 might be a bit pricey for the performance it delivers. But its unique form factor, plus the additional modules that Khadas gives its users a niche device for a select few.

Intel plans to lay off more than 15% of its workforce by the end of the year, the company announced today, meaning roughly 15,000 employees or more (potentially up to 17,475 based on recent Intel headcount numbers of 116,500) — a vast restructuring that comes amid troubling financial results this quarter. The layoffs rank among the most severe in Intel's 56-year history. 

The news came during an earnings call for the semiconductor giant, which also announced that it has encountered yield issues with its Meteor Lake processors, problems that negatively impacted the bottom line. The company lost $1.6 billion in the quarter. Intel said it will cancel some 'underperforming' products in a bid to save costs and plans to suspend its seemingly sacred dividend in the fourth quarter. At the time of publication, Intel's stock had dropped 19% in after-hours trading.

CEO Pat Gelsinger outlined the changes and the rationale behind them in a blog post to Intel.com; he noted that the company aims to reduce spending by $10 billion in 2025 with the move. Intel will offer employees buyouts and early retirement options but will inevitably sever other employees via layoffs. Intel specifically called out looming cuts to marketing and R&D, the latter being a concerning development for a company that's reliant on developing new tech, along with reductions in general and administrative staff.

Intel did say that its 18A process node, which is exceedingly important to its success as a fledgling custom foundry, remains on track. The company recently released its 1.0 process design kit (PDK), a critical set of design rules that defines how its customers can produce chips using the node. Intel also says its next-gen Panther Lake and Clearwater Forest processors remain on track.

Analyst Patrick Moorhead Tweeted that Gelsinger told him about the Meteor Lake yield issue. It's unclear if these issues are related to the widespread crashing and instability problems Intel has encountered with its 13th- and 14th-gen desktop processors. The company had previously cited a shortage of packaging capacity for its inability to meet OEM demand for the Meteor Lake processors, but Moorhead says Gelsinger told him that yield issues fueled the need for 'hot lots,' or accelerated wafer runs of chips that incur excessive cost relative to normally scheduled operations. 

Here are the most relevant bullet points from the company's press release:

• Implementing comprehensive reduction in spending, including a more than 15% headcount reduction, to resize and refocus.
• Suspending dividend starting in the fourth quarter of 2024. The company reiterates its long-term commitment to a competitive dividend as cash flows improve to sustainably higher levels.
• Reducing Operating Expenses: The company will streamline its operations and meaningfully cut spending and headcount, reducing non-GAAP R&D and marketing, general and administrative (MG&A) to approximately $20 billion in 2024 and approximately $17.5 billion in 2025, with further reductions expected in 2026. Intel expects to reduce headcount by greater than 15% with the majority completed by the end of 2024.
• Reducing Capital Expenditures: With the end of its historic five-nodes-in-four-years journey firmly in sight, Intel is now shifting its focus toward capital efficiency and investment levels aligned to market requirements. This will reduce gross capital expenditures* in 2024 by more than 20% from prior projections, bringing gross capital expenditures in 2024 to between $25 billion and $27 billion. Intel expects net capital spending* in 2024 of between $11 billion and $13 billion. In 2025, the company is targeting gross capital expenditures between $20 billion and $23 billion and net capital spending between $12 billion and $14 billion.
• Reducing Cost of Sales: The company expects to generate $1 billion in savings in non-variable cost of sales in 2025. Product mix will continue to be a headwind next year, contributing to modest YoY improvements to 2025's gross margin.
• Maintaining Core Investments to Execute Strategy: The company continues to advance its long-term innovation and path to leadership across process technology and products, and the increased efficiency from its actions is expected to further support its execution. In addition, Intel continues to sustain investments to build a resilient and sustainable semiconductor supply chain in the United States and around the world.
• Intel is nearing the completion of its promised five-nodes-in-four-years strategy, with Intel 18A on track to be manufacturing-ready by the end of this year and production wafer start volumes in the first half of 2025. In July 2024, Intel released to foundry customers the 1.0 PDK for Intel 18A. The company’s first two Intel 18A products, Panther Lake for client — the first microprocessor to use RibbonFet, PowerVia and advanced packaging — and Clearwater Forest for servers, are on track to launch in 2025.
• Simplifying Our Portfolio: We will complete actions this month to simplify our businesses. Each business unit is conducting a portfolio review and identifying underperforming products. We are also integrating key software assets into our business units so we accelerate our shift to systems-based solutions. And we will narrow our incubation focus on fewer, more impactful projects.

"These decisions have challenged me to my core, and this is the hardest thing I’ve done in my career. My pledge to you is that we will prioritize a culture of honesty, transparency and respect in the weeks and months to come," Gelsinger said in his blog post. 

Intel missed its Q2 2024 projections as revenue declined 1% year-over-year, contributing to a $1.61 billion net loss. Intel posted a 38.7% gross margin, a notable 4.8 percentage points below guide. Intel also reported a much lower-than-expected guide for its third quarter of $12.5 to $13.5 billion and forecasts a disappointing 38% gross margin.

You can see Intel's slide deck for its second-quarter 2024 results in the above album.

One-Netbook, the team behind the OneXPlayer handheld console and the OneXGPU GPU enclosure, just introduced its first mini-PC on Indiegogo—the OneXPlayer M1. This tiny device (via Liliputing) has the Intel Core Ultra 9 185H and up to 32 GB of RAM. It also has an RJ45 port, Wi-Fi 6E, and Bluetooth 5.2, meaning you have three different connectivity options.

This tiny device has a 200 mm x 120 mm footprint, making it highly portable—it’s so small that you can fit it inside a relatively loose pocket. It also weighs 600 grams, so you don’t have to worry about hurting your back if you want to move your mini-PC.

However, this small size means that the mini-PC has only limited slots. It can only accommodate a single M.2 2280 SSD and one SODIMM slot so you can say goodbye to the advantages of dual-channel memory.

Nevertheless, the OneXPlayer M1 does not lack physical ports to connect your devices. It has two USB4 Type-C ports, one USB 3.2 and one USB 2.0 Type-A port, two HDMI ports, one DisplayPort, an RJ45 ethernet jack, a 3.5 mm audio outlet, and a microSD card reader. More importantly, it also comes with an OCuLink port to give you the option to provide it with the graphical oomph of the OneXGPU eGPU.

Aside from the Power button, One-Netbook also gave its mini-PC an RGB button to adjust the RGB lights on the case. But what’s interesting is that the Turbo button from PCs in the 1980s and 1990s is returning on the OneXPlayer M1. The Turbo button will push the 185H’s power draw from the base 45 to 60 watts — just five watts short of its maximum configurable TDP. A 100-watt USB-C power supply also powers the mini-PC, so you’ll have ample power, even pushing the processor to its limit.

The OneXPlayer M1 has almost the same shape and size as the OneXGPU, with the external GPU weighing about 250 grams heavier. The latter also features several ports, including two HDMI ports, two DisplayPort outlets, two USB 3.2 Type-A ports, a USB4 Type-C port with 100 watts reverse power delivery, and a gigabit RJ45 port. This makes both devices perfect for each other, allowing you to get a fully featured computer you could put in two pockets.

Pre-orders for a 32 GB RAM / 1 TB SSD OneXPlayer M1 are already in Japan at JPY142,310 (or around $900). But if you bundle it with the OneXGPU, you get a 10% discount on the eGPU. So, if you’re looking for a small PC you can quickly move around but don’t sacrifice performance and graphical power, you should watch out for the OneXPlayer M1 mini-PC.

Asus has released the all-new NUC 14 Pro+ to its mini-PC line, with the choice between Intel Core Ultra 9, 7, or 5 CPUs. The notable upgrade over the NUC 13 Pro is its Intel Ultra series Meteor Lake CPUs, which now come with an integrated NPU for local generative AI processing. These are available as a barebone kit, where you must buy your own M.2 storage and RAMs and a complete build weighing 800 grams.

This NUC is marketed towards home and office use and relies on generative AI for content creation and productivity. The CPU choices are between Intel Ultra 7 155H, Ultra 5 125H, and Ultra 9 185H. The prebuild has two additional CPUs with vPro—the Ultra 7 165H and the Ultra 5 135H. Depending on the build, it will be bundled with a 120-watt or 150-watt power adapter.

It has a compact design compared to the tall chassis variant, with an anodized aluminum casing in a slightly more significant 5 x 4-inch form factor (as opposed to standard 4x4 casings) due to the integrated cooling systems it uses. The extra space allowed for cramming in three 6mm heat pipes with a double-sided heat exchanger and a fan for airflow. Asus is advertising as a measure to ensure cooling needed to ensure uninterrupted operation during generative AI workloads.

For graphics, it uses the integrated Xe and provides 4K support through up to quad 4K monitors. This support is possible via two of its Thunderbolt 4 ports in the rear, which have DisplayPort 1.4 integration, and two HDMI ports. Two SO-DIMM slots for DDR5-5600 are up to 96 GB for memory expansion. For networking, it has one 2.5G Ethernet port with an Intel I226V controller, Wi-Fi GE+ 2x2 with Wi-Fi sensing, and Bluetooth 5.3.

One of the neat additions is the toolless design, which allows you to easily access its internals and build a barebone system or upgrade it a little more easily. For storage, it allows two M.2 NVMe SSDs—2280 for PCIe x4 Gen 5 drives and 2242 for PCIe x4 Gen 4.

The omission of a 3.5mm audio jack is peculiar while advertising audio output via HDMI in its place. It's uncertain why Asus would not include an audio controller and, hence, a 3.5mm jack, which would allow TRRS earphones/ headphones with an integrated mic to be used, especially for a mini PC aimed towards home or business use. Other I/O options are adequate for many users.

Apart from having a smaller form factor, it might be difficult to ignore other alternatives once you choose your preferred CPU, storage, and RAM options and weigh its offerings and final price against what you would get with a custom-built mini-ITX system, including more I/O options and audio jacks.

The NUC 14 Pro+'s pricing starts at $860 with the Core Ultra 5 125H, 512GB SSD and 16GB RAM. Meanwhile, the Core Ultra 7 155H model with a 1TB SSD and 32GB RAM sells for $1,160, and the top Core UItra 9 185H SKU with 1TB SSD and 32GB RAM will set you back $1,239.

Intel recently released a one-line code patch for its Meteor Lake CPUs, resulting in huge performance wins in Linux. That single line of code fine-tunes the P-State CPU frequency scaling driver. In benchmark tests, the seemingly minor change resulted in Linux performance increases as high as 72% on Intel's Core Ultra PC systems.

The patch, sent out on June 6, 2024, adjusts the Intel P-State Energy Performance Preference (EPP) default “balance_performance” value. This sets the balance between power and performance in a processor. The allowable range for the EPP is from 0 to 255 and it was set to 128 in February before Intel changed it to 115. The latest patch further refines the value from 115 to 64.

Initial testing of the change showed up to 19% better performance on the Meteor Lake processors and up to 11% improvement in performance per watt. Michael Larabel at Phoronix decided to conduct some more extensive benchmark tests to determine how much better the Meteor Lake CPU could perform after the single-line patch.

Testing was conducted using an Acer Swift Go 14 with the Intel Core Ultra 155H running the current Linux 6.10 kernel. Larabel ran benchmarks pre-update, then applied Intel’s patch to the kernel and reran the same tests. He performed more than 100 benchmarks testing the patch and found the change yielded an improvement of 7% to the geometric mean across all tests.

Most notably, the Kvazaar 2.2 Bosphorus 4K video encoding benchmark with a preset of Super Fast blazed through at 20.51 frames per second with the patch. Without the patch, encoding happened at 11.94 fps. Hence, the one line of changed code resulted in an improvement in video encoding of 72% with the Meteor Lake laptop. Other video encoding benchmarks were also improved, but not as dramatically.

The least impressive performance increase observed was in Python testing, coming in at just a 2% uptick with the patch applied. Still, any increase is better than none, and the overall improvement can be appreciated by anybody trying to get the most out of their Meteor Lake processor. Larabel hopes the patch will be included in the Linux 6.11 Git kernel, if not applied as a maintenance fix for the current Linux 6.10 cycle.

Asus has added a new member to its NUC 14 family of mini-PCs. The new Asus NUC 14 Performance lives up to its suffix by packing in up to an Intel Core Ultra 9 185H ‘Meteor Lake’ processor, and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 desktop GPU into a compact chassis. This new mini-PC, which supports up to five 4K displays, aims to provide “power, efficiency, and style,” to the business market.

Pondering over the specs and design of the new Asus NUC 14 Performance it quickly becomes apparent that this is one of the new ROG NUC gaming devices wearing a business suit. The processing options are the same, the 70 x 180 x 50mm (2.5 liter) chassis looks the same. Checking ports and other components – they are all the same, down to the Killer Wi-Fi 6E and Realtek ALC256 audio. However, images of the new Asus NUC 14 Performance show no evidence of the customizable “addressable backlit ROG panel.” Of course, the front panel ROG logo has been removed too, with a simple black quadrilateral on the front of the Asus NUC 14 Performance.

The official product pages for the Asus ROG NUC, a device that was unveiled officially at CES in January, confirm the same hardware specs. We know that the ROG NUC with Intel Core 7 155H a discrete RTX 4060 and 0.5TB of storage is $1,629. The higher-end model with Intel Core Ultra 9 185H, discrete RTX 4070, and 1TB storage is listed at $2,199. Asus NUC 14 Performance pricing should rightfully be lower, with the RGB stuff removed, but as these devices are marketed to businesses and enterprises it might mean a premium is applied.

As official custodians of the NUC line, Asus has also created some more traditional ‘4x4’ NUC 14 designs, namely the NUC 14 Pro and NUC 14 Pro+. In March we found out these Meteor Lake devices are priced at $394 and $896, respectively. Asus has taken its time between revealing these products and availability, with the 4x4 NUC 14 mini PCs only recently hitting retail.

Linux 6.9 is now live, bringing with it a number of improvements including performance enhancements for Intel Core Ultra Meteor Lake processors and AMD Ryzen CPUs (as reported by Phoronix). Regarding the Core Ultra optimizations, Linux 6.9 includes a tuning adjustment to Intel's P-State driver which is claimed to boost performance. Phoronix tested this new tuning adjustment and found it improved performance by 2.6% on average.

The new adjustment applies specifically to Intel's Energy Performance Preference (EPP) system for its Meteor Lake parts. EPP dictates the performance behavior of the CPU and tells it to run in a more power-optimized state, more performance-oriented state, or a balanced state depending on how it is configured. In Linux 6.9, EPP has been updated to feature a balanced performance profile of 115 and a performance EPP of 16, which reportedly improves the chip's performance per watt.

2.6% isn't a huge improvement, but there were a few applications Phoronix discovered that benefit more than others from the EPP changes. In the AV1 encoding tests specifically, Phoronix found that performance improved by nearly 10% with the Linux 6.9 EPP changes compared to Linux 6.8 without the changes. Another set of applications that saw a decent improvement included various code compilation benchmarks, Unvanquished, Xonotic, and FFmpeg which were roughly 6% faster in Linux 6.9.

Phoronix also showed power consumption tests, thermals, and clock speed changes with the new EPP changes. On average, the Linux 6.9 version consumed one additional watt compared to Linux 6.8. Ironically the peak turbo clock went down slightly from 4.885 GHz down to 4.872 GHz, however, the average clock speed went up by a few MHz (from 3.127 GHz to 3.129 GHz). Thermals were virtually identical staying within 87 degrees Celsius average. Testing was done on an Acer laptop sporting a Core Ultra 7 155H 16-core processor.

Linux 6.9 won't make your Core Ultra laptop lightyears faster, but it will provide noticeable performance improvements in some workloads. In fact, we are surprised that some benchmarks improved by up to 10%, given how minor the power and clock speed differences are between Linux 6.9 and 6.8.

Mini PC specialist Minisforum has launched a new device, claiming several firsts. The new AtomMan X7 Ti becomes the first in the firm's AtomMan line, described as a high-end cutting-edge marque by Minisforum. It is also claimed to be the “first Intel Ultra 9 AI Mini PC with a 4-inch Touchscreen.” With the rising popularity of extra screens in PCs, integrating one into a compact desktop might be a popular idea.

Starting from the outside, we see that the AtomMan X7 Ti would be a conventional-looking NUC-alike apart from two things. Firstly, it features a 4-inch 480p touch display which covers a fair portion of the top panel. Secondly, it comes with a neat stand that angles the display panel into an easy glanceable view. Furthermore, Minisforum has followed some logic by situating a 1080p Windows Hello compatible webcam and dual mics above the touchscreen, appealing to video conferencing fans.

While we are considering external features, let’s look at the ports. Despite its compact size (145 x 145 x 49mm), the AtomMan X7 Ti features a decent quantity and selection of ports, as follows: RJ45 5G Ethernet Port ×2, DP 2.0, HDMI 2.1, OCulink Port (up to 64Gbps), USB4 ×2, USB3.2 Gen2 Type-A ×2, USB3.2 Gen1 Type-A, USB2.0, a 3.5mm Combo Jack, SD Card slot, and a Power Button with an embedded fingerprint reader.  Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 complement the dual Ethernet ports. It must also be noted that the mix of dedicated monitor and USB4 ports means you can connect up to four external displays to this machine.

Moving inside, the star of the show is the new Intel Core Ultra 9 processor 185H with a 16C/22T CPU running at up to 5.1 GHz, and onboard Arc GPU with eight Xe cores running at up to 2.35 GHz. This Meteor Lake chip is cooled by the new Cold Wave cooling system featuring a large diameter fan, 3 copper heatpipes, and a phase-change module.

Upgrading the AtomMan X7 Ti PC’s RAM and storage isn’t going to be too tricky. It uses standard DDR5-5600 SO-DIMMs, up to a max of 64GB. There are also two M.2 2280 PCIe 4.0 SSD slots, and the aforementioned wireless functionality comes courtesy of a socketed Intel BE200 card, so it can be changed for repair or upgrade.

We don’t have pricing for the AtomMan X7 Ti. Minisforum says it will go on pre-sale from May 20, so we expect to hear more about pricing and shipping RAM/storage configurations at that time. Those particularly interested in this product can sign up for an email about it and get a $30 coupon from Minisforum.

We caught a first glimpse of the AtomMan X7 Ti at CES 2024 when it was showcased with other interesting new computers like the Minisforum HX200G, Mini Workstation MS-01, and the V3 tablet.

Building small gaming laptops means bumping up against a certain element of physics: hot components in small spaces can only do so much. But the Razer Blade 14 ($2,699.99 as tested) does something we haven't seen from other 14-inch gaming laptops lately: it utilizes a full-power Nvidia RTX 4070 laptop GPU.

That's one of many things that the Blade 14 does right, including solid build quality, a bright screen, and upgradeable components.

But while other 14-inch gaming laptops may hold back on some of the graphics power, they're also as much as $700 cheaper, to the point where the Razer Blade 14's price tag may have you considering them.

Design of the Razer Blade 14 (2024)

In the contest to be one of the best gaming laptops, it used to be that Razer was considered the Apple of gaming, at least in terms of looks. But Apple has switched up its design and Razer's laptops look the same as last year's. The Razer Blade 14 looks very much like the ones we saw in 2023 and 2021.

In many ways, that's positive. Except for a little bit of flex in the lid, this chassis is built solid, with an aluminum, minimalist design. It has clean lines, and a strong hinge, and won't look out of place when you're not gaming (at least, in the mercury color we tested, which is really just silver).

The lid features Razer's tri-headed Snake logo in a tone-o-tone design, the benefit being that it's not so easy to see. I've never been a fan of this logo, but it's the only thing on this system that screams "gaming."

The 14-inch display is surrounded by a bezel that's a bit thicker than I'd like on the top and bottom, made more noticeable on the white model because the bezels are black. I noticed it more while working than while playing games.

The deck is clean, and the island-style chiclet keys have a pop of color when you turn the RGB lighting on.

Each side of the laptop features both a USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A port and a USB 4 Type-C port. I love this balance, and it's rare to see a company put those ports on each flank. In addition, the left side gets a 3.5 mm headphone jack and the power port, while the right side has an HDMI output and a lock slot. 

At 4.05 pounds and 12.23 x 8.97 x 0.7 inches, the Blade 14 is only a bit heavier and larger than some productivity-focused notebooks. But some of the competition goes lighter; The Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 is 3.31 pounds and 12.24 x 8.66 x 0.64 inches, though we'll see later that that makes for other tradeoffs,  while the HP Omen Transcend 14 is 3.6 pounds and 12.32 x 9.19 x 0.71 inches. The larger Alienware m16 R2, which fuses productivity looks with gaming power, is 14.33 x 9.81 x 0.93 inches and weighs 5.75 pounds.

Razer Blade 14 (2024) Specifications

Gaming and Graphics on the Razer Blade 14

Gaming performance is perhaps the most interesting part of the Razer Blade 14. Over the past few months, several laptop companies have released thin gaming notebooks with lower-power versions of powerful GPUs to manage thermals. Razer, however, is using a 140W Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 laptop GPU with an AMD Ryzen 9 8945HS.

The Asus ROG Zephyrus, for instance, tops out at 90W on the RTX 4070, while the Alienware m16 R2 we tested uses the full 140W like Razer (though that has more space inside). The HP Omen Transcend 14 we tested used a 65W RTX 4060, so expect that to lag behind a bit here.

All four of these laptops were tested at 1080p and their native resolution. For comparing 90W vs 140W RTX 4070 performance, 1080p is the way to go, as the Razer Blade has a 2560 x 1600 screen and the Zephyrus uses a higher-resolution 2880 x 1800.

I played a bit of Alan Wake 2 on the Blade. For this machine, I used the 1707 x 1067 "Quality" render resolution, DLSS, with the effects on the medium preset and using the low ray tracing option. On a daylit street in Bright Falls, the game ran between 30 and 40 fps, and it stayed closer to 40 fps during a combat scene in a morgue.

On the Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmark (highest settings), the Blade won out at 1080p, running the test at 121 fps. The Alienware took second place at 113 fps, while the Zephyrus fell behind at 100 fps. The Blade and Alienware had very similar scores at 2560 x 1600.

Cyberpunk 2077 on the ray tracing ultra preset was a closer test. The Blade 14 hit 42 fps at 1080p and 42 fps at 2560 x 1600. The difference between it and the Alienware is minimal. The Zephyrus hit 39 fps at 1080p, which isn't as big a gap as we see in some other games.

Far Cry 6 (ultra) showed the Alienware (89 fps) just beat the Blade 14, which ran the benchmark at 86 fps at 1080p. Both hit the same 71 fps at native resolution. Meanwhile, the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 fell down to 77 fps.

On Red Dead Redemption 2 (medium settings), the Razer Blade hit 73 fps at 1080p, besting the Zephyrus (67 fps) and the Alienware, which fell to a rare third place for FHD.

The AMD-based laptops showed strength on Borderlands 3 (badass preset), with the Blade hitting 108 fps at 1080p and the Zephyrus coming in second at 86 fps. The Intel-based rigs shared similar numbers in the 60s at FHD.

We stress-tested the Blade with Metro Exodus, running the game's benchmark 15 times in a loop on the RTX preset. The system ran the benchmark at an average of 81.53 fps, which was fairly consistent across the runs. The CPU ran at an average of 3.68 GHz and measured 56 degrees Celsius. The GPU averaged 916.57 MHz and ran at 55 degrees C.

Productivity Performance on the Razer Blade 14

The Razer Blade 14 we tested came with an AMD Ryzen 9 8945HS, 32GB of RAM, a 1TB M.2 PCIe SSD, and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Laptop GPU. For most non-gaming tasks, this should be plenty.

On Geekbench 6, the Razer Blade 14 was the best of our test group with a single-core score of 2,684 and a multi-core score of 13,781. The ROG Zephyrus G14, with the same CPU, scored lower, but still came out ahead of the systems with Intel CPUs. The Alienware m16 R2 and HP Omen Transcend 14, each with an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H, fell to the bottom of the chart.

The Blade copied 25GB of files at a rate of 1,951.61 MBps, surpassing the Omen (1,829.51 MBps) and the Zephyrus (the slowest, at 1,352.76 MBps). The Alienware was the fastest of the bunch at 2,014.58 MBps.

On Handbrake, Razer's laptop transcoded a 4K video to 1080p in 4 minutes and 1 second, coming ahead of the Zephyrus and Omen but behind the Alienware.

Display on the Razer Blade 14

Razer's 14-inch, 2560 x 1600 display is bright and reasonably colorful and runs as fast as 240 Hz for quick-twitch esports.

I was using the Blade when the trailer for Joker: Folie à Deux dropped. While it's not OLED or even micro LED it showed off the trailer well. One scene in which the Joker and Harley Queen dance under the moon was an appropriate shade of blue, which contrasted greatly with a similar scene in which they're in front of a large orange fire. 

Similarly, the screen made Alan Wake 2 look good, showing off the daylight town of Bright Falls and a dark horror scene taking place inside a police morgue with equal detail. Lighting from a flashlight on Saga Anderson's face was eerie.

The Blade 14's screen covers 111% of the sRGB gamut and 78.9% of the more challenging DCI-P3 color space. That's just a few points behind the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 (even though Asus went with OLED), but the Omen Transcend's OLED screen was far more vivid at 135% sRGB and 191% DCI-P3. The Alienware m16 R2 was the least colorful of the bunch.

Where the Blade won out was brightness, measuring over 446 nits on our light meter. The Zephyrus G14 and Omen Transcend 14 tied at 392 nits, while the Alienware measured only 280 nits.

Keyboard and Touchpad on the Razer Blade 14

Razer's keyboard is fine. It's a bit spongy for my taste (I prefer clicker feedback) and the travel didn't feel terribly deep, but I also didn't tire while using it. For what it's worth, I hit 120 words per minute on the monkey type test at 98% accuracy, which is about as good as I ever do on a notebook.

The touchpad on the Blade 14 is very large, which I like — after all, a laptop this size is just as likely to be used for web browsing and work as it is for gaming. However, I did feel the need to go in and adjust the sensitivity. It sometimes seemed like it needed to catch up with me. The touchpad itself is nice and smooth, and in general Windows gestures worked.

Audio on the Razer Blade 14

Razer owns THX, so I expected some greatness from the Blade 14's audio. The truth is, it was fine. You can only fit so much in a 14-inch chassis.

"Astrovan" by Mt. Joy filled one of our small lab rooms (and clearly some people outside heard it, based on conversations I had after leaving the room). The vocals were crystal clear, as were the guitars and cymbals, but there was effectively no bass, and not all of the percussion really thumped. In Razer or the THX app (both have the same options), you can switch between spatial audio and stereo. The spatial audio is nice and made the track feel a bit more spread out, but I won't lie - I think stereo just sounded slightly better.

In Alan Wake 2, the game's eerie music and dialogue-heavy gameplay both sounded fine. The gunfire in combat was punchy, but not as much as on bigger machines with larger speakers.

Upgradeability on the Razer Blade 14

There are 8 Torx screws on the bottom of the laptop. Use a T5 screwdriver to remove them. I was able to get the base off of the simple with a pry tool. I was in under two minutes.

At first glance, I only noticed one repairable part: the M.2 PCIe SSD. But underneath some heat shielding, the Wi-Fi card and two RAM slots are also accessible. (I'm not sure I've ever seen RAM slots side-by-side before, but here they are!). There's not a ton of room for expansion without replacing components, but it's nice to see it at all in this thin of a system; On the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14, the RAM is soldered down.

Battery Life on the Razer Blade 14

The Blade 14 may be the size of an ultraportable, but like most gaming laptops, its endurance doesn't impress. On our battery test, which browses the web, streams videos, and runs OpenGL tests over Wi-Fi with the screen set to 150 nits of brightness, the Blade 14 lasted 6 hours and 26 minutes.

That's longer than the Alienware (6:12) and HP Omen (5:10), though the Zephyrus eked out a slightly longer time (6:45).

Heat on the Razer Blade 14

The Razer Blade stayed remarkably cool during our Metro Exodus stress test. Skin temperatures measured during the test were cooler than expected.

The keyboard, between the G and H keys, measured 106.5 degrees Fahrenheit. The touchpad measured 87 F at the center but measured a warmer 93 F at the top left corner. On the bottom, the laptop measured 115 F.

Webcam on the Razer Blade 14

The webcam on the Razer Blade 14 is decent. It's just sharp enough to keep my beard from looking like it's drawn on my face, but I'm not going to tell you that it's incredibly detailed. Captures with it seemed a bit darker than some other laptop webcams, but it caught the blue in my eyes accurately.

I appreciate the privacy shutter, as there's no need for a sticker over the webcam. It can be a bit tough to move the physical shutter with short fingernails, but it did the job.

Razer also includes infrared sensors to let you use the webcam to sign in with Windows Hello. It works well, though you have to remember to leave the webcam uncovered for it to work. (This is the case on any Windows PC with a privacy shutter).

Software and Warranty on the Razer Blade 14

The Blade doesn't come too bogged down with software. The main app is Razer Synapse. With options to customize your RGB keyboard, change performance modes, adjust the audio equalizer, create macros, and more. THX Spatial Audio, which also allows you to adjust the speakers, is the other big piece of software (Razer owns THX).

There is still the Windows bloat in the Start menu, with links to apps like Spotify, Grammarly, and Luminar Neo.

Razer sells the Blade 14 with a one-year warranty on the system and a two-year warranty on the battery. Razer offers two versions of its extended "RazerCare" coverage: Essential ($249.99) and Elite ($399.99). Both extend coverage to 3 years, come with 24-hour support, cover mechanical failures, and include surge protection. But only the more expensive Elite version offers accidental damage protection for drops, spills, falls, and collisions.

Configurations of the Razer Blade 14

This year's Razer Blade 14 has limited configurations. All of the configurations come with an AMD Ryzen 9 8945HS, a 14-inch, 240 Hz, 2560 x 1440p display, and 1TB of storage.

The version we reviewed came in "mercury" white (but is also available in black) with 32GB of RAM, and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070. That costs a pricey $2,699.99.

The base model is $2,199.99 and comes in black with an RTX 4060 and 16GB of RAM for $2,199.99. As of this writing, this configuration is only available on Razer's website.

These prices are perhaps the biggest strike against the Blade. It starts expensive and only goes up from there. As tested, the Blade 14 was $2,699.99, The Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 with the same CPU, RAM and storage was $1,999.99 when we reviewed it. The Asus also has a higher-resolution OLED screen, but its RTX 4070 uses less power and doesn't play games as well. An HP Omen Transcend 14 specced similarly, with an Intel Core Ultra 9 and specs otherwise similar to the Zephyrus is also $1,999.99. That's a pretty big premium Razer is asking for.

Bottom Line

There's a lot to like about the Razer Blade 14, some of it in spite of its small size. It has a full-powered RTX 4070, whereas some other companies have used lower-wattage variants; It has upgradeable RAM, storage, and Wi-Fi, where some other companies have soldered down the memory; and it has a bright display, even if Razer didn't opt for OLED.

But one thing keeps me from giving it a full-throated recommendation: it's very expensive. Similarly configured 14-inch gaming laptops from Asus and HP don't give you full-power graphics cards, but you get the same RAM and storage, similar (if not identical) CPUs, and OLED panels for as much as $700 less.

If you have the money, the Razer Blade 14 is the best-performing 14-inch gaming laptop we've seen. Its style may be conservative and its touchpad isn't my favorite, but it more than delivers on fundamentals. But the Razer premium is a lot of money that could be spent on games. For hundreds of dollars, I can deal with slightly less performance.

Those who want the most power they can squeeze out of a 14-inch laptop should keep an eye on the Blade 14, but their wallet may lead them elsewhere, and that's totally understandable.

MORE: How to Buy a Gaming Laptop

MORE: Best Gaming PCs

MORE: Best Ultrabooks and Premium Laptops

Intel outlined its use of AI tools in recent chip designs, tools that are undoubtedly being used to create some of the best CPUs for the coming years. Intel claims the AI tools for optimizing SoC layouts have slashed the time required by some of the firm’s semiconductor design processes from six weeks to just "minutes."

Having proved their worth in thermal sensor placement design in Meteor Lake, Intel’s AI-based tools are expanding their scope to other important areas such as high-speed I/O, efficiency, product sampling, and other chip floor plan optimizations. Naturally, the new AI tools will be used in Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake, as well as other future client products, says Intel.

The AI tools have been particularly useful in optimizing chip thermals. Perhaps that was merely the first area where Intel felt comfortable to test AI options, or perhaps it was an area that offered the biggest potential for gains. Whatever the case, Intel says that optimizing the placement of thermal sensors on its chips was previously a mix of science and art. Passing this aspect of chip design to AI has resulted in massive time savings.

Confusingly, Intel appears to be defining some of its AI tools as 'Augmented Intelligence' rather than 'Artificial Intelligence.' The key difference here, according to the chipmaker, is that Augmented Intelligence "is a subset of artificial intelligence that focuses on how humans and machines work together." In a similar vein, the blog seems to try and assure readers that Intel engineers are not going to be replaced by AIs anytime soon.

Mark Gallina, Intel’s Client Computing Group (CCG) principal engineer and senior system thermal and mechanical architect, explained how the AI tools worked when designing its Meteor Lake laptop chips. He outlined the process where engineers have to "precisely analyze complex, concurrent workloads that activate the CPU core, input/output (I/O) and other system functions to accurately determine the location of thermal hotspots." Compounding this complexity is the placement of the sensors, resulting in a design and revision cycle that can take an experienced engineer "a few weeks." Apparently, the new Intel AI tool can crunch thousands of variables and return several ideal design suggestions in just minutes.

Intel AI seems to have proven the viability of the tools with Meteor Lake designs, and now the CCG is embracing a wider range of AI-driven tools to speed up the hardware design process. Intel says it has already made progress in tools that deliver fast and accurate signal integrity analysis for high-speed I/O. The tools have delivered up to 60% efficiency gains in I/O, and reduced sample testing cases by 40%. Moreover, Intel has an interactive AI tool for helping to answer CPU design trade-off questions.

We've previously reported on other firms using AI to optimize chip design. Intel’s arch nemesis, AMD, said last year that it would extend the use of AI-enabled tools in the design of its chips. Also in 2023, we saw over 200 chip designs placed-and-routed using the Synopsys DSO.ai electronic design automation (EDA) software. Even small-time electronics enthusiasts can now wield AI to help with chip design, and last year there was a contest that provided free manufacturing muscle for lucky AI chip design winners.

Republican lawmakers in the U.S. have criticized Joe Biden's government following Huawei's recent launch of the MateBook X Pro based on Intel's Core Ultra 'Meteor Lake' processors, Reuters reports. The product's debut has reignited concerns over the Chinese firm's ongoing technology exports, which have been on a trade restriction list since 2019 for sanctions violations. But there is a catch: Donald Trump's administration has granted Huawei's export license.

The controversy centers around Huawei's continued receipt of high-tech components from U.S. companies, specifically Intel, despite being placed on a blacklist intended to curb its access to such processors. This blacklist mandates that suppliers must secure a specialized and hard-to-obtain license before conducting business with Huawei.

This situation has drawn sharp rebukes from Republican Congressman Michael Gallagher, the chair of the House of Representatives Select Committee on China, who expressed frustration over the continued technological exports to Huawei. Another prominent critic, Republican Congressman Michael McCaul, echoed these sentiments, emphasizing that he was previously assured that the licenses to Huawei would be discontinued, a promise he sees as unfulfilled.

Meanwhile, Intel has been supplying Huawei with processors for its laptops since 2020 under a license granted by the Trump administration, which is expected to expire later this year without renewal.

When it comes to export controls in regards to Huawei (or any other China-based entity), there are at least two goals for the U.S. government to achieve here: preserve Huawei's access to leading-edge American technologies (to halt China's military development) and to halt (or at least slow down) Huawei's economic development so that it could not develop its high-tech might.

While the U.S. government achieves the first goal by severely limiting the performance of processors that can be shipped to China in general and Huawei in particular, it allows shipments of relatively high-performance CPUs (which comply with the regulations) to the People's Republic.

On the one hand, this helps American companies like Intel and Qualcomm (4G versions of processors only, though) to sell their products to high-profile notebook and smartphone maker Huawei. On the other hand, getting premium processors from world-class suppliers like Intel and Qualcomm enables Huawei to make world-class products, such as the latest MateBook X Pro based on Intel's newest Meteor Lake CPUs; this helps improve the company's economic prowess. This economic prowess is used to research and develop microelectronics fab tools that could be used to build fabs that make chips to improve China's military capability.

While the concern is more than understandable, we can only wonder why Republican lawmakers were not precisely concerned in 2020 about the same Intel and Qualcomm license grant by the Donald Trump administration.

Huawei this week announced a new high-end MateBook X Pro laptop that packs Intel's latest Core Ultra 'Meteor Lake' processor with built-in AI accelerator, reports Nikkei. This was surprising: The U.S. government has blacklisted Huawei, and the company cannot get the latest processors from AMD and Intel without the approval of American authorities.

The Huawei MateBook X Pro 2024 can be based on the Core Ultra 7 155H or the Core Ultra 9 185H processor with built-in graphics that are programmed to support up to 40W TDP. The laptops will come with options for 16GB or 32GB of RAM and either 1TB or 2TB of NVMe PCIe storage, according to Huawei Central, though details like memory type or speed as well as SSD interface were not touched upon. 

The laptop features a 14.2-inch OLED touch-sensitive display with a 3:2 aspect ratio and a resolution of 3120x2080 pixels. It boasts a peak brightness of 1,000 nits in HDR mode, a refresh rate of 120 Hz, and supports the Adobe RGB, P3, and sRGB color gamuts. 

One of the standout features of the MateBook X Pro is its lightweight design. Thanks to its magnesium alloy chassis, the machine weighs just around 980 grams (2.16 pounds), which makes it lighter than Apple's MacBook Air. Since it is based on Intel's premium Core Ultra processor that is actively cooled and can run at up to 40W, Huawei suggests its laptop can challenge or even outperform Apple's MacBook Pro 14 (though Huawei does not disclose which MacBook Pro 14 and with which processor it used for comparison). 

As for connectivity, the MateBook X Pro 2024 is equipped with a Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5.3 adapter, one USB-C port, and two Thunderbolt 4 ports. Also, the laptop has a 70 WHr battery, six speakers, four microphones, a keyboard, a trackpad, and a 1080p webcam. 

Huawei's 2024 MateBook X Pro runs Huawei's proprietary Harmony OS and can use Huawei's Pangu AI services for real-time translation, improving image quality, and summarizing texts, among other things. In addition, the machine can use AI models from other companies, such as Baidu's Ernie Bot and iFlytek's Spark. It is unclear whether MateBook X Pro can take advantage of Intel Core Ultra's built-in AI acceleration capabilities, or if it relies on the cloud. 

Huawei's MateBook X Pro is set to hit the Chinese market on April 18, priced at up to 14,999 yuan ($2,027) for the version featuring Intel's Core Ultra 9 processor paired with 32 GB of memory and 2 TB of storage. 

It is unclear whether an international version of Huawei's MateBook X Pro with Windows 11 is planned and, if so, when it is set to hit the market.

Intel announced it's finally bringing LGA1851 socket-compatible Core Ultra processors based on the Meteor Lake architecture to the market. But before you get your hopes up, these chips are targeted at edge computing rather than consumer desktops. Intel's new edge-focused CPUs will be the first-ever Meteor Lake CPUs to come in an LGA socket format.

The chips are optimized for on-premise edge computing. Intel reports that its Core Ultra processors for edge will offer up to 5X better image classification inference performance compared to its outgoing 14th Gen Raptor Lake Refresh desktop processors. The new chips incorporate all of Intel's bleeding-edge Meteor Lake architecture, including an Arc-based iGPU and an NPU for graphics and AI-based workloads.

The chips target customers in retail, education, industrial, kiosk, and smart point-of-sale-systems for brick-and-mortar stores, to name a few. Edge computing is a large business for Intel and encompasses more than 90,000 deployments alone. These new Meteor Lake parts, announced at the company's Vision 2024 event, will likely sell like hotcakes as the industry continues to shift computing strategies from mainstream cloud solutions to edge-focused applications.

Edge computing is nothing new, but its capabilities have become extremely popular over the past few years. Edge computing is a strategy that localizes most of the computing power that is usually provided by cloud services. In a practical application, devices within a theoretical business will connect directly to a small mainframe located inside the building for data processing. This is different from traditional cloud computing where business devices (like kiosks) connect directly to a cloud service provider.

Edge computing has massively grown in popularity over the past few years as data consumption has ballooned beyond what the internet can handle. According to TechTarget, 75% of enterprise-generated data is expected to be created outside centralized data centers, including through edge-based solutions.

So far Intel has unveiled five Meteor Lake PS 15W SKUs and four Meteor Lake PS 45W models. The 15W parts include Core Ultra 3, Core Ultra 5, and Core Ultra 7 SKUs with core counts ranging from 8 to 12. All of these chips have just two P-cores while the rest of the cores are E-cores and LPE-cores. Boost clocks range from 4.2 GHz to 4.9 GHz on the P-cores, depending on the model.

The Meteor Lake PS 45W chips have far more cores, ranging from 14 to 16 total. The Core Ultra 5 models come with four P-cores, eight E-cores, and two LPE-cores, while the higher end Core Ultra 7 models have six P-cores, eight E-cores, and two LPE-cores. Clocks range from 4.5 GHz to 5 GHz, depending on the model.

While these are edge-focused CPUs, the fact that they use socket LGA1851 means they could be compatible with future LGA1851 desktop boards. LGA1851 is the successor to LGA1700 and is expected to arrive on the consumer side with Intel Arrow Lake CPUs. Compatibility will come down to the firmware availability and whether or not Intel wants to include support for the processors on all platforms and chipsets, or if support will be restricted to specific boards.

Regardless, if you're an enthusiast or a desktop user, Intel's edge-focused chips shouldn't be on your radar. Intel is already preparing to launch an enhanced desktop version of Meteor Lake (codenamed Arrow Lake) later this year, sporting a more advanced Intel processing node and 5x the AI performance, and likely with more CPU cores. Arrow Lake will be optimized for gaming and desktop computing and will be the first Intel desktop CPU lineup to incorporate an NPU.

There are a lot of portable notebooks suitable for gaming, but when it comes to truly high-performance machines that can rival desktops, they tend to be pretty large. Acer this week introduced its Predator Helios Neo 14 that offers high-end components and a great display in a rather compact 14-inch chassis. In addition, Acer launched its new AMD and Nvidia-based Nitro 14 laptop that offers performance at a more affordable price.

Acer Predator Helios Neo 14

Acer's Predator Helios Neo 14 comes equipped with a 14.5-inch IPS display with an up to 3072x1920 resolution and a variable refresh rate of up to 165 Hz with Nvidia G-Sync on top. The laptop weighs 1.9 kilograms (4.19 pounds) and is up to 20.9 mm (0.82 inches) thick. 

The Predator Helios Neo 14 packs up to Intel's Core Ultra 9 185H (16 cores, 6P + 8E + 2LP at up to 5.10 GHz) paired with up to 32 GB of LPDDR5X memory,  up to 1 TB PCIe Gen4 SSD as well as up to Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4070 8GB Laptop GPU. To ensure consistent performance of the system under high loads in games or demanding applications, the laptop is outfitted with an advanced cooling system with heat pipes featuring two 5th Gen AeroBlade 3D fans and Vortex Flow technology as well as liquid metal thermal grease on the CPU. 

As for connectivity, Acer's compact gaming laptop has everything that one comes to expect from a powerful 2024 gaming notebook, including Intel's Killer 1675i Wi-Fi 6E + Bluetooth adapter, a Thunderbolt 4 port, two USB Type-A connectors, two display outputs (one DisplayPort using a USB-C connector and one HDMI), a microSD card reader, a 1080p webcam, and a 3.5 mm connector for headsets.  

The machine is equipped with a 76 Whr battery, and Acer bundles a 230W proprietary AC adapter for fast charging and gaming.

The Predator Helios Neo 14 (PHN14-51) is set to be released in North America in May with a starting price of $1,799.99, and in EMEA in June with a starting price of €1,999. The entry-level configuration packs Intel's Core 5 Ultra 125H (14 cores, 4P + 8E + 2LP cores at up to 4.50 GHz) CPU and Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4050 6 GB GPU, so it remains to be seen how much top-end versions will cost.

Acer Nitro 14

In addition to launching its top-of-the-range 14.5-inch Predator Helios Neo 14 laptop, Acer also launched its lower-cost 14.5-inch Nitro 14 machine that promises to offer performance gaming at a considerably lower cost.

Acer's Nitro 14 is based on an up to AMD's six-core Ryzen 7 8845HS processor with Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4060 8 GB Laptop GPU, up to 32 GB of LPDDR5X memory, and an up to 1 TB PCIe Gen 4 SSD. On the connectivity front, the Nitro 14 has a Wi-Fi 6E + Bluetooth adapter, a USB 4 port, two USB Type-A connectors, two display outputs (one DisplayPort using USB-C, one HDMI), a microSD card reader, and an audio jack.

The machine comes with a 14.5-inch display featuring an up to 2560x1600 resolution and an up to 120 Hz variable refresh rate with Nvidia's G-Sync. Compared to the Predator Helios Neo 14, the Nitro 14 is both heavier (2.02 kilograms, 4.45 pounds) and thicker (22.84 mm, 0.9 inches), but it is much more affordable too.  

The Acer Nitro 14 (AN14-41) is set to be available in North America in May with a starting price of $1,299.99, and in EMEA in June with a starting price of €1,199.

16-Inch Nitro Laptops Get a Refresh

In addition to launching its all-new Predator Helios Neo 14 and the Nitro 14, Acer also refreshed its 16-inch Nitro 16-series machines with new CPUs. 

The Nitro 16 (AN16-73) has been updated with up to an Intel Core i7-14700HX processor and up to an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 Laptop GPU. The machine will be available in North America in May, starting at $1,399.99, and in EMEA in June, starting at €1,599 for an entry-level configuration. 

The AMD-based Nitro 16 (AN16-43) is now equipped with an up to an AMD Ryzen 9 8945HS processor and up to an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 Laptop GPU. The machine also features a 16-inch WQXGA (2560x1600) display with 500 nits of brightness and a 165 Hz refresh rate. This unit will be available in North America in May, starting at $1,399.99.

Intel announced two new extensions to its AI PC Acceleration Program in Taipei, Taiwan, with a new PC Developer Program that’s designed to attract smaller Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and even individual developers, and an Independent Hardware Vendors (IHV) program that assists partners developing AI-centric hardware. Intel is also launching a new Core Ultra Meteor Lake NUC development kit, and introducing Microsoft’s new definition of just what constitutes an AI PC. We were given a glimpse of how AI PCs will deliver better battery life, higher performance, and new features.

Intel launched its AI Developer Program in October of last year, but it's kicking off its new programs here at a developer event in Taipei that includes hands-on lab time with the new dev kits. The program aims to arm developers with the tools needed to develop new AI applications and hardware, which we’ll cover more in-depth below.

Intel plans to deliver over 100 million PCs with AI accelerators by the end of 2025. The company is already engaging with 100+ AI ISVs for PC platforms and plans to have over 300 AI-accelerated applications in the market by the end of 2024. To further those efforts, Intel is planning a series of local developer events around the globe at key locations, like the recent summit it held in India. Intel plans to have up to ten more events this year as it works to build out the developer ecosystem.

The battle for control of the AI PC market will intensify over the coming years — Canalys predicts that 19% of PCs shipped in 2024 will be AI-capable, but that number will increase to 60% by 2027, highlighting a tremendous growth rate that isn’t lost on the big players in the industry. In fact, AMD recently held its own AI PC Innovation Summit in Beijing, China, to expand its own ecosystem. The battle for share in the expanding AI PC market begins with silicon that enables the features, but it ends with the developers that turn those capabilities into tangible software and hardware benefits for end users. Here’s how Intel is tackling the challenges.

What is an AI PC?

The advent of AI presents tremendous opportunities to introduce new hardware and software features to the tried-and-true PC platform, but the definition of an AI PC has been a bit elusive. Numerous companies, including Intel, AMD, Apple, and soon Qualcomm with its X Elite chips, have developed silicon with purpose-built AI accelerators residing on-chip alongside the standard CPU and GPU cores. However, each has its own take on what constitutes an AI PC.

Microsoft’s and Intel’s new co-developed definition states that an AI PC will come with a Neural Processing Unit (NPU), CPU, and GPU that support Microsoft’s Copilot and come with a physical Copilot key directly on the keyboard that replaces the second Windows key on the right side of the keyboard. Copilot is an AI chatbot powered by an LLM that is currently being rolled into newer versions of Windows 11. It is currently powered by cloud-based services, but the company reportedly plans to enable local processing to boost performance and responsiveness. This definition means that the existing Meteor Lake and Ryzen laptops that have shipped without a Copilot key actually don't meet Microsoft's official criteria, though we expect Microsoft's new definition to spur nearly universal adoption of the key.

While Intel and Microsoft are now promoting this jointly developed definition of an AI PC, Intel itself has a simpler definition that says it requires a CPU, GPU, and NPU, each with its own AI-specific acceleration capabilities. Intel envisions shuffling AI workloads between these three units based on the type of compute needed, with the NPU providing exceptional power efficiency for lower-intensity AI workloads like photo, audio, and video processing while delivering faster response times than cloud-based services, thus boosting battery life and performance while ensuring data privacy by keeping data on the local machine. This also frees the CPU and GPU for other tasks. The GPU and CPU will step in for heavier AI tasks, a must as having multiple AI models running concurrently could overwhelm the comparatively limited NPU. If needed, the NPU and GPU can even run an LLM in tandem.

AI models also have a voracious appetite for memory capacity and speed, with the former enabling larger, more accurate models while the latter delivers more performance. AI models come in all shapes and sizes, and Intel says that memory capacity will become a key challenge when running LLMs, with 16GB being required in some workloads, and even 32GB may be necessary depending on the types of models used.

Naturally, that could add quite a bit of cost, particularly in laptops, but Microsoft has stopped short of defining a minimum memory requirement yet. Naturally, it will continue to work through different configuration options with OEMs. The goalposts will be different for consumer-class hardware as opposed to workstations and enterprise gear, but we should expect to see more DRAM on entry-level AI PCs than the standard fare — we may finally bid adieu to 8GB laptops.

Intel says that AI will enable a host of new features, but many of the new use cases are undefined because we remain in the early days of AI adoption. Chatbots and personal assistants trained locally on users' data are a logical starting point, and Nvidia's Chat with RTX and AMD's chatbot alternative are already out there, but AI models running on the NPU can also make better use of the existing hardware and sensors present on the PC.

For instance, coupling gaze detection with power-saving features in OLED panels can enable lower refresh rates when acceptable, or switch the screen off when the user leaves the PC, thus saving battery life. Video conferencing also benefits from techniques like background segmentation, and moving that workload from the CPU to the NPU can save up to 2.5W. That doesn’t sound like much, but Intel says it can result in an extra hour of battery life in some cases.

Other uses include eye gaze correction, auto-framing, background blurring, background noise reduction, audio transcription, and meeting notes, some of which are being built to run on the NPU with direct support from companies like Zoom, Webex, and Google Meet, among others. Companies are already working on coding assistants that learn from your own code base, and others are developing Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) LLMs that can be trained on the users’ data, which is then used as a database to answer search queries, thus providing more specific and accurate information.

Other workloads include image generation along with audio and video editing, such as the features being worked into the Adobe Creative Cloud software suite. Security is also a big focus, with AI-powered anti-phishing software already in the works, for instance. Intel’s own engineers have also developed a sign-language-to-text application that uses video detection to translate sign language, showing that there are many unthought-of applications that can deliver incredible benefits to users.

The Core Ultra Meteor Lake Dev Kit

The Intel dev kit consists of an ASUS NUC Pro 14 with a Core Ultra Meteor Lake processor, but Intel hasn’t shared the detailed specs yet. We do know that the systems will come in varying form factors. Every system will also come with a pre-loaded software stack, programming tools, compilers, and the drivers needed to get up and running.

Installed tools include Cmake, Python, and Open Vino, among others. Intel also supports ONNX, DirectML, and WebNN, with more coming. Intel’s OpenVino model zoo currently has over 280 open-source and optimized pre-trained models. It also has 173 for ONNX and 150 models on Hugging Face, and the most popular models have over 300,000 downloads per month.

Expanding the Ecosystem

Intel is already working with its top 100 ISVs, like Zoom, Adobe and Autodesk, to integrate AI acceleration into their applications. Now it wants to broaden its developer base to smaller software and hardware developers — even those who work independently.

To that end, Intel will provide developers with its new dev kit at the conferences it has scheduled around the globe, with the first round of developer kits being handed out here in Taipei. Intel will also make dev kits available for those who can’t attend the events, but it hasn’t yet started that part of the program due to varying restrictions in different countries and other logistical challenges.

These kits will be available at a subsidized cost, meaning Intel will provide a deep discount, but the company hasn’t shared details on pricing yet. There are also plans to give developers access to dev kits based on Intel’s future platforms.

Aside from providing hardware to the larger dev houses, Intel is also planning to seed dev kits to universities to engage with computer science departments. Intel has a knowledge center with training videos, documentation, collateral, and even sample code on its website to support the dev community.

Intel is engaging with Independent Hardware Vendors (IHVs) that will develop the next wave of devices for AI PCs. The company offers 24/7 access to Intel’s testing and process resources, along with early reference hardware, through its Open Labs initiative in the US, China, and Taiwan. Intel already has 100+ IHVs that have developed 200 components during the pilot phase.

ISVs and IHVs interested in joining Intel’s PC Acceleration Program can join via the webpage. We’re here at the event and will follow up with updates as needed.

Otherworldly looks are the norm for Alienware laptops, but not the new m16 R2 ($1,849.99 as tested.) It looks more mainstream than previous Alienware laptops for a wider appeal; this is a gaming laptop that you can use every day.

The m16 R2 is overall very well-balanced, combining excellent build quality, comfortable input devices, plenty of connectivity, and a good screen at a reasonable price. It doesn’t offer an Nvidia RTX 4080 like some laptops in this class, but its price reflects that.

Design of the Alienware m16 R2

Alienware is known for edgy designs, so the m16 R2’s almost mainstream styling comes as a surprise. Gone is the LED-lit rear thermal shelf of the previous model, replaced with, well,  nothing. Alienware says it was able to shrink the internals and maximize the thermal capabilities of this new model to make the protrusion unnecessary.

This R2 model is indeed noticeably trimmer at 14.33 x 9.81 x 0.93 inches compared to the outgoing model’s 14.5 x 11.41 x 1 inches. It’s also a lot lighter, at 5.75 pounds versus 7.17 pounds. The Asus ROG Strix G16 isn’t as wide but is deeper than the m16 R2, at 13.94 x 10.39 x 0.89 inches, and slightly lighter at 5.51 pounds. Another competitor, the Lenovo Legion Pro 5i Gen 8, is 14.3 x 10.25 x 1.05 inches and 5.6 pounds.

Sans the thermal shelf, the m16 R2 brings over many styling elements from the previous model, including the metal lid with “16” imprinted on it and the RGB-lit alien head logo.

Other RGB lighting elements include the keyboard and the touchpad border, but that’s all. The Alienware Command Center app lets you change colors and set up profiles. The lighting can also be turned completely off.

I’m a fan of the m16 R2’s new look. It’s not polarizing like many previous Alienware laptops, and while it won't pass as a business machine, it’s subdued enough to not attract undo attention, especially with the lighting disabled.

The m16 R2’s build quality is also excellent; the chassis is rigid and there's a luxurious soft-touch coating on the top. The laptop feels solid and inspires confidence when it’s picked up. The metal lid is also quite stiff.

Port selection on the right edge includes a micro SD card reader and two USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A ports, the one furthest back supports PowerShare to charge devices while the laptop is turned off.

Left ports include Ethernet and a 3.5 mm universal audio jack.

Finally, there are two Thunderbolt 4 ports, an HDMI 2.1 video output, and the barrel-style AC power jack on the back. Internally, the m16 R2 sports a new Intel Wi-Fi 7 + Bluetooth 5.3 networking card.

Alienware m16 R2 Specifications

Gaming and Graphics on the Alienware m16 R2

Our Alienware m16 R2 review unit has an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H processor, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Laptop GPU, 16GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD. This is a high-end configuration that should have no trouble with today’s games.

For benchmark comparison, we’re including the Asus ROG Strix G16 (Core i9-13980HX, RTX 4070 140W), the smaller 14-inch ROG Zephyrus G14 (Ryzen 9 8945HS, RTX 4070 90W), and the Lenovo Legion Pro 5i Gen 8 (Core i7-13700HX, RTX 4060 140W). The ROG Strix G16 and the Legion Pro 5i Gen 8 have the same GPU wattage (140W) as our Alienware, though both use a more powerful Core HX-class CPU. Meanwhile, the ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lighter-weight system with a Ryzen HS CPU and an RTX 4070 with much less wattage, but is similar in mission to the m16 R2 in that it doesn't look so much like a gaming PC.

I played through Shadow of the Tomb Raider at 2560 x 1600 at the game’s Very High preset, pushing a few of the settings beyond that preset’s defaults to make the game as demanding as possible. It didn’t phase the m16 R2; I saw 110 to 125 fps going through caves and around 100 fps in jungle scenes. The game played extremely fluidly.

We’ll be using the 1080p numbers in the charts below for comparison, but we also included native resolution numbers. Our Alienware and the Legion use 2560 x 1600, the ROG Strix G16 is 1920 x 1200, and the ROG Zephyrus G14 is 2880 x 1800.

In Shadow of the Tomb Raider (Highest detail preset), the Alienware narrowly missed the top spot at 1080p, with 113 frames per second to the ROG Strix G16’s 116 fps, though it dropped to just 68 fps at native resolution. The Legion wasn’t far off those numbers despite using an RTX 4060, with 107 fps at 1080p and 62 fps at native.

We just started running Cyberpunk 2077 (Ray Tracing Ultra), so we only have numbers for the Alienware and the ROG Zephyrus G14. The numbers were surprisingly close, though the Alienware doesn’t have as many pixels to push at native resolution (22 versus 16 fps).

Far Cry 6 (Ultra) wasn’t the Alienware’s best showing, where it outperformed only the ROG Zephyrus G14, with 89 fps at 1080p and 71 fps at native. The ROG Strix G16 managed 98 fps at 1080p and the Lenovo 94 fps.

Red Dead Redemption 2 (Medium) remains a difficult title to run. The Alienware didn’t keep pace, hitting 65 fps at 1080p compared to the ROG Strix G16’s 72 fps and the Lenovo’s 70 fps. Even the ROG Zephyrus G14 did better, with 67 fps.

In our last test, Borderlands 3 (at the game’s “badass” detail preset), the Alienware finally eked out a victory, with 102 fps at 1080p to edge out the ROG Strix G16’s 100 fps and the Lenovo’s 90 fps.

As our numbers show, running games at the Alienware’s 2560 x 1600 native resolution is not a cakewalk even with the RTX 4070, so getting fluid playability in some games, such as Red Dead Redemption 2, may require using lower detail settings, or you could simply lower the resolution to 1080p. It would be nice to see Alienware offering a 1080p/1200p panel for esports and especially considering the base GPU is the RTX 4050, which isn’t going to be well-suited for 2560 x 1600.

We stress-tested the m16 R2 running the Metro Exodus benchmark 15 times at RTX settings to simulate 30 minutes of gaming. During the test, the m16 R2 averaged 81.9 fps across all runs with minimal variation between runs; the minimum fps was 80.35 and the highest was 82.77. The Core Ultra 7’s P-cores ran at an average frequency of 3.6 GHz and an average temperature of 73 degrees Celsius, the E-cores 2.6 GHz and 70 degrees, and the LPE-cores 1.1 GHz and 66 degrees. The GeForce RTX 4070 had an average core clock of 2,380 MHz and an average temperature of 68 degrees.

Productivity Performance on the Alienware m16 R2

Our Alienware m16 R2 review unit has a Core Ultra 7 155H processor, 16GB of DDR5-5600 RAM, and a 1TB SSD. Everyday tasks and more demanding apps should be no problem for a laptop of this caliber.

The Core Ultra 7 chip in our Alienware is unlikely to match the older Core HX-class chips in the ROG Strix G16 and the Lenovo, though it should outperform the ROG Zephyrus G14’s Ryzen 9 HS.

The Alienware started at the back of the pack in the cross-platform Geekbench CPU benchmark; its 1,797-point single-core showing was the lowest in the group, with the Lenovo being the next slowest (1,852 points) and the ROG Strix G16 being the fastest (2,067 points). It also predictably didn’t match the ROG Strix G16 and the Lenovo in multi-core, with 12,382 points to their respective 18,227 and 14,967 points.

The Alienware surprisingly came back in our Handbrake video transcoding test, in which it converted a 4K video to 1080p in 3 minutes and 54 seconds. The ROG Strix G16 fell behind here (5:05) and only the Lenovo did slightly better (3:39).

The Alienware also impressed in our 25 GB file transfer test with a 2,014.58 MBps transfer rate. The Lenovo was in a distant second place with 1,792.63 MBps while the ROG Strix G16 was the slowest (1,238.04 MBps).

Display on the Alienware m16 R2

The m16 R2 has a 16-inch IPS display with a 16:10 aspect ratio and a 2560 x 1600 resolution. I appreciated that its matte surface kept reflections from ambient and overhead lighting to a minimum. The picture is well saturated and has ample brightness; creatures and landscapes in BBC’s Planet Earth III looked lifelike. Likewise, running through the lush jungles in Shadow of the Tomb Raider was an immersive experience. The gameplay was extremely smooth thanks to the display’s 240 Hz refresh rate and Nvidia G-Sync framerate smoothing.

The Alienware’s screen didn’t impress on brightness; its 280-nit peak matched the ROG Strix G16 (279 nits) but was well off the Lenovo’s 349 nits. The ROG Zephyrus G14 was far brighter (392 nits), but its screen is much smaller. Color-wise, the Alienware's 70% DCI-P3 and 99% sRGB coverages were the least impressive in the group; the Lenovo’s 83% DCI-P3 and 117% sRGB were the highest.

Keyboard and Touchpad on the Alienware m16 R2

The Alienware’s keyboard has a rubbery but sure feel; I managed 108 words per minute with 99% accuracy in the MonkeyType online typing test, a good result for me. The keystrokes also sound subdued so you won’t feel self-conscious typing away in a quiet place.

Layout-wise, all keys seem to be where they should be. I give Alienware a thumbs-up for including full-size arrow keys, though the cluster is forced into the main keyboard area and truncates the right Shift key. Pressing Fn + the right Windows key disables both Windows keys. There are volume and microphone control keys down the right edge. The F2 through F6 keys are user-programmable shortcuts in the Alienware Command Center app, which also controls the per-key RGB backlighting. The backlighting is bright and vibrant.

The m16 R2’s touchpad ranks as one of my favorites in recent memory. The pad is rightly sized for the 16-inch screen, and the RGB lighting around it defines its border well. My fingers glided over its smooth surface. Physically clicking by pressing the pad has a precise feel.

Audio on the Alienware m16 R2

The m16 R2’s side-firing speakers under its palm rest are above average. The vocals and guitar in All Time Low’s “Monsters” came through clear and distortion-free even at maximum volume, which is enough to entertain a few people around a table, and there’s sufficient bass to prevent the sound from being tinny. The Dolby Atmos equalizer in the Dolby Access app greatly helps the sound quality; the Balanced preset sounded best to my ears. This also held true while I played through Shadow of the Tomb Raider; the Balanced preset perks up the high frequencies a little, so it’s easy to hear enemy footsteps.

Upgradeability of the Alienware m16 R2

Eight Philips-head screws secure the m16 R2’s bottom access panel. All are fortunately equal length, though the two at the front (palm rest) corners are retainer-style and don’t come out. The panel doesn’t pop free once the screws are removed, but the retainer screws create a gap when loosened where you can wedge a plastic pry tool or credit card to run down the edges and pop the clips free. The panel is hinged at the rear, so I popped the front edge free before doing the sides.

The m16 R2 has excellent upgradability, with two DDR5-5600 SODIMM slots and two M.2 2280 PCIe slots. The M.2 2230 wireless card and the battery are also serviceable.

Battery Life on the Alienware m16 R2

Gaming laptops aren't known for long battery life, and many still don’t last long away from a charger. But this Alienware lasted 6 hours and 13 minutes in our test, where we have laptops browse the web, stream video over Wi-Fi and run OpenGL tests with the screen set to 150 nits of brightness. The ROG Strix G16 lasted considerably longer (8:49) but it did much better than the Lenovo (4:54).

Heat on the Alienware m16 R2

We measure the surface temperatures of gaming laptops while running the Metro Exodus benchmark at RTX settings. During the benchmark, we measured 73 degrees Fahrenheit on the m16 R2’s touchpad, 99 degrees between the keyboard G and H keys, and 104 degrees on the underside. The laptop felt warm to the touch but never hot, so Alienware appears to have the heat under control.

Fan noise is noticeable while gaming in a quiet room; the sound is essentially air running through the cooling fans rather than motor noise. While not gaming, the laptop can run essentially silent or close to it using the Quiet profile in the Alienware Command Center.

Webcam on the Alienware m16 R2

I found it m16 R2’s 1080p webcam to be average at best, with a pixelated image and overly softened details. It also doesn’t have a privacy shutter or a webcam kill switch. At least it has an infrared sensor so you can use Windows Hello facial recognition to log into Windows, which is your only biometric option since there’s no fingerprint reader.

Software and Warranty on the Alienware m16 R2

The m16 R2’s most important app is Alienware Command Center. The System section lets you switch performance profiles; our unit was set to Performance by default, which made for a lot of fan noise at idle. Switching to the Quiet or Balanced profile really toned down the fans. The app also has a section for AlienFX RGB lighting for the power button, alien head lid logo, and touchpad border. You can save your preferences in presets.

Dolby Atmos is another important app to switch between sound profiles and set equalizers. It also provides Dolby Vision controls.

No trial software is installed, and even many of the usual apps included with Windows, such as Spotify, weren’t present on our review unit. It’s an overall clean Windows installation.

The m16 R2 has a one-year warranty, with options to upgrade to four years.

Alienware m16 R2 Configurations

The base Alienware m16 R2 includes a Core Ultra 7 155H processor, a GeForce RTX 4050 GPU, 16GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD for $1,499.99. A 2560 x 1600 240 Hz screen is standard across all models with no upgrade options. Our $1,849.99 review model bumps the GPU to the highest option, an RTX 4070, but leaves everything else the same. Other available upgrades include a Core Ultra 9 185H, 64GB of RAM, and dual SSDs up to 8TB of total storage.

Alienware doesn’t offer an RTX 4080 as do some laptops in this class. Nonetheless, the m16 R2 seems to be competitive on price as we reviewed it. I saw the Lenovo Legion Pro 5i Gen 8 for $1,424.99 on Lenovo.com, though it only had a four-zone keyboard (not per-key RGB like our Alienware) and Wi-Fi 6E, not Wi-Fi 7. On the other hand, the Asus ROG Strix G16 was much more expensive, commanding $2,299.99 from Asus directly. That price nets a more powerful Core i9-14900HX CPU, but you get just a 720p webcam.

Bottom Line

Alienware’s m16 R2 is a winner. This laptop has no real weaknesses and does well almost everywhere. Its toned-down looks relative to previous Alienware laptops are an improvement in our view, allowing this laptop to have a wider appeal and superior everyday usability.

Other high points include strong build quality, comfortable input devices, ample connectivity, a gaming-ready screen, and above-average speakers. It even gets good battery life and can be easily upgraded after purchase.

The m16 R2’s pricing is competitive as we tested it with the RTX 4070 next to the Lenovo Legion Pro 5i Gen 8 and especially the Asus ROG Strix G16. It’s less competitive in its base RTX 4050 model, which is steeply priced at $1,499.99 when the Legion with that card is around $1,000. The sweet spot for this model is when it’s configured with the RTX 4060 or RTX 4070. No RTX 4080 is offered.

Overall, the m16 R2 is a step forward for Alienware and ranks highly as a notebook you can use for gaming, and plenty else.

MORE: How to Buy a Gaming Laptop

MORE: Best Gaming PCs

MORE: Best Ultrabooks and Premium Laptops

AMD has shared some insight into its "consumer AI performance" with Tom's Hardware, featuring a face-off between the AMD Ryzen 7 7840U (15W) and Intel Core Ultra 7 155H (28W). In the selected large language model (LLM) performance tests using Llama 2 and Mistral Instruct 7B, we see that the red team's solution is far quicker, uses less power, and is available cheaper. Though we expect chipmakers to cherry-pick benchmarks, these results show Intel's AI performance isn't even close to the local AI processing horsepower AMD demonstrates here.

For its test comparisons, AMD installed LM Studio on the competing laptops – a task that it says takes just a few minutes. Once LM Studio is installed, you can run various LLMs locally for utmost privacy, subscription fee-free, and without an internet connection. As we mentioned in the intro, Llama 2 and Mistral Instruct 7B were leveraged for various tasks. Specifically, AMD got the AIs to write a story multiple times, make a demo with a bouncing ball in Unity, and write a poem. For some background information, Llama 2 is a state-of-the-art LLM from Meta, and Mistral Instruct 7B is an LLM with 7.3 billion parameters developed by ex-Meta and DeepMind devs.

AMD chose performance metrics to showcase its Ryzen's prowess, including measurements of 'time to first token'—which charts the time from inputting a prompt and pressing enter to the first results showing up. Another critical performance measure is 'tokens per second,' where an LLM response is delivered line by line.

As a reminder of the properties of the latest Ryzen chips that align themselves to local AI acceleration, AMD says that three kinds of cores can be used in concert: NPU, RDNA 3 GPU, and Zen 4 CPU. In the demo we watched, an AMD exec said that AVX512 and VNNI acceleration built into the Zen 4 CPU cores were behind the winning results you see in the charts. That's interesting, as we expected to be told about the more powerful NPU in the Phoenix vs Meteor Lake processors.

AMD has published a blog about how to run LM Studio and various LLMs on your local machine. The tutorial guides you through getting started on either an 'AMD Ryzen AI PC' or a PC with a Radeon RX 7000 or newer GPU installed.

Intel is well aware of the relatively paltry AI performance delivered by the Meteor Lake family. The iconic CPU maker has already officially teased that both Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake will have three times more AI performance for GPU and NPU. Intel's next-gen laptop and desktop processors are due later this year.

The MSI Claw gaming handheld has finally launched in a limited form, primarily as an exclusive to MSI's store. To be specific, the higher-end Core Ultra 7 models aren't available from MSI or other vendors and are labeled as a March 15th pre-order when viewed on Newegg. This means that if you want to buy an MSI Claw today, you'll be going with the Core Ultra 5 model.

The handheld uses a 7-inch 1080p, 120 Hz, IPS display akin to that of ROG Ally but with no apparent support for Variable Refresh Rate. The triggers and (RGB) joysticks are both confirmed to be hall-effect, which should improve their long-term reliability, and the built-in back handles look pretty ergonomic.

Regarding overall form factor and expansion, the MSI Claw doesn't seem radically different from any of the other AMD-powered PC handhelds we've looked at lately, particularly ones also using 7-inch, 120 Hz displays. Internally, things get more interesting since this competition for the Steam Deck's handheld PC throne adopts full Intel internals rather than relying on the same AMD APU designs that power current-generation consoles.

Below, we have listed the three core versions of the MSI Claw. Note that all models have 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM running at 6400 MT/s.

• MSI Claw A1M-052US — Entry-level $699 model. Comes with Core Ultra 5-135H with 8 onboard Intel Arc Graphics Xe cores, and 512GB NVMe storage. 
• MSI Claw A1M-051US — Mid-range $749 model. Comes with Core Ultra 7-155H with 8 onboard Intel Arc Graphics Xe cores, and 512GB NVMe storage.
• MSI Claw A1M-050US — High-end $799 model. Comes with Core Ultra 7-155H with 8 onboard Intel Arc Graphics Xe cores, and 1TB NVMe storage.

Unfortunately, we don't have any benchmarks to properly compare the Core Ultra 5 to the Core Ultra 7 in total performance. However, considering the shared number of Arc graphics cores across the Core Ultra 5 and Core Ultra 7, it seems most likely that the performance difference introduced across these differing handhelds will be more CPU-bound than iGPU-bound.

This new architecture can deliver surprisingly competitive results based on prior testing of the Core Ultra 7 155H and its graphics against AMD's best. However, early previews of the MSI Claw show Intel's latest to somewhat underperform in low-TDP handhelds compared to AMD, which likely only worsens with direct performance comparisons. We recommend waiting for some proper benchmarking of the release-MSI Claw before considering it over established options like Deck OLED or ROG Ally,.

Over the last several years, a number of the best gaming laptops have started to ditch some of their gaming trappings to look more acceptable anywhere you go. After all, you might not want someone looking at you funny while you play Helldivers 2 at a coffee shop.

The Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 ($1,999.99 as tested, $1,499.99 to start), is the latest in that trend, and in some ways takes it to an extreme. Without the RGB keyboard and an LED stripe on the lid, you might mistake it for one of the many MacBook Pro knockoffs on the market.

While previous versions of the Zephyrus went up to an RTX 4090, Asus has made a change here, refocusing on portability and topping out at an RTX 4070 — and a 90-watt 4070, at that. This performance is usable, but it doesn't exactly scream, and it will force gamers to decide if the new, thinner, premium design is worth it, or if they'd rather carry something a bit chunkier that performs the way they're used to.

Design of the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14

This will be controversial, but the design of the new Zephyrus G14 is refreshing. I like gaming laptops that have a little bit of personality, and I felt that while the previous white design had some pop, the "AniMe Matrix" lighting never really hit the spot. With this redesign, the Zephyrus G14 may go a bit too far in the other direction for some, looking a fair bit like a MacBook Pro, down to the CNC aluminum unibody chassis.

The new lid ditches the personalized LED lighting for a simple slash across the center. There are some customizations you can make to it, but the only lighting option is white. Asus' Republic of Gamers logo, which I've never been a fan of, is minimized to a lower corner.

Opening the laptop, you might be fooled into thinking that it is a standard productivity device. Sure, the keyboard is single-zone RGB, but set to white, you might not notice. With a roomy touchpad and plain stylings, there's little here to shout "gaming."

The benefit you do get from the gaming background is in ports; there's a fair share of them here. While the included 180W power adapter isn't USB Type-C, at least you can plug in in both ways. On the left side, you'll also find HDMI, a USB 4 Type-C port, a USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A port, and a 3.5 mm headphone jack.

On the right side, there's another USB-A port, a slower USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C port, and a microSD card reader.

At 12.24 x 8.66 x 0.64 inches and 3.31 pounds, the Zephyrus is part of an increasingly popular class of thin gaming notebooks. For instance, the 2023 Razer Blade 14 measured 12.23 x 8.97 x 0.70 inches and weighed 4.05 pounds. In contrast, the more standard Dell G15 (5530) measured 14.07 x 10.80 x 1.06 inches and weighs 6.19 pounds, while the Asus ROG Strix G16 is 13.94 x 10.39 x 0.89 inches and 5.51 pounds.

Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 (2024) Specifications

Gaming and Graphics on the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14

We tested the Zephyrus G14 with an  AMD Ryzen 9 8945HS and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 laptop GPU, so we expected some solid middle ground performance. That being said, there are some important facts to keep in mind, including that Asus clocked the GPU at 90W max graphics power. The same RTX 4070 in the 2023 Razer Blade 14 was set at 100W and paired with a Ryzen 9 7940HS.

The Asus ROG Strix G16 is a larger system, but in a similar price band. That, too, uses an RTX 4070, but at 140W max graphics power and in conjunction with an Intel Core i9-13980HX. And while we tested a Dell G15 with a Core i7-13650HX RTX 4060, that had 140W max graphics power and higher boost clocks. All of this is to say, the numbers will tell interesting stories here. Since each of these laptops have different native resolutions, 1080p gaming will be crucial for comparisons.

I played some Alan Wake 2 on the Zephyrus, running the game at the 1920 x 1200 "quality" resolution using DLSS upscaling with effects at the medium preset. As Saga investigated a murder scene, the game ran between 40 and 45 fps, though it jumped up to the 50's in Saga's "Mind Place," as she pieced the murder together.

On the Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmark at the highest settings, the Zephyrus hit 100 fps at 1080p and 48 fps at its native 2880 x 1800. At FHD, the Zephyrus was closest to the 4060-based Dell G15, which ran at 103 fps, with the Blade 14 and Strix G16 outperforming.

We only ran Cyberpunk 2077 on the Zephyrus and the Dell. At 1080p, the two systems ran the game's benchmark on Ray Tracing Ultra at 39 and 34 fps, respectively.

The Zephyrus came in last on Far Cry 6, running the test at 77 fps at 1080p and 55 fps at its native resolution. Even the Dell, with an RTX 4060, hit 87 fps. The Strix G16 did the best, at 98 fps at 1080p and at 94 fps at its native 1920 x 1200.

On Red Dead Redemption 2, the Zephyrus was neck and neck with the Dell again. Asus' 14-inch gaming notebook played the benchmark at 67 fps at 1080p and 33 fps at its native resolution, while the Dell G15 played at 68 fps. Here, the Razer Blade 14 squeaked out a victory over the Zephyrus, at 73 fps at 1080p and and 45 fps at 4K.

The same pattern occurred on Borderlands 3's "Badass" preset, with the Zephyrus, at 86 fps at 1080p, beating the Dell by a single frame (it ran the game at 46 fps at 2880 x 1800). The Strix G16 won out at 1080p, running at 100 fps.

To stress the Zephyrus, we ran the Metro Exodus benchmark on the RTX preset 15 times, which takes about half an hour. Across those runs, the laptop played the game at an average frame rate of  73.36 frames per second. During the stress test, the CPU ran at an average 3.75 GHz and measured 73.25 degrees Celsius. The GPU ran at 1.67 GHz and ran at 87 C.

Productivity Performance on the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14

Our ROG Zephyrus G14 review unit came with an AMD Ryzen 9 8945HS, part of its latest "Hawk Point" lineup. As we've pointed out previously, this chip doesn't do much differently from its predecessor. The laptop also came with 32GB of RAM and a 1TB PCIe SSD.

On Geekbench 5.5, the Zephyrus achieved a single-core score of 1,890 and a multi-core score of 11,800. That's better than the Dell G15 (Intel Core i7-13650HX, 1,784/10,311), but fell just behind the Razer Blade 14 and its AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS on single-core (though it won on multi-core). The Asus ROG Strix G16 won out in both single- and multi-core with its Intel Core i9-13980HX.

The Zephyrus copied 25GB of files at a rate of 1,352.76 MBps, beating the Razer Blade 14 and Asus ROG Strix G16. The Dell G15 was the fastest of the bunch, at 1,417.51 MBps.

Where the Asus won was on Handbrake, transcoding a 4K video to 1080p in 4 minutes and 16 seconds. That's 29 seconds faster than the next closest machine, the Razer Blade 14.

Display on the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14

Asus has outfitted the Zephyrus G14 with a 14-inch, 2880 x 1800-resolution OLED display that runs at 120 Hz. The screen also supports G-Sync and Dolby Vision HDR.

When I watched the trailer for Deadpool & Wolverine, I felt the colors were good, but not the best I've seen on an OLED panel. In particular, Deadpool's red suit had a bit more of a maroon hue in some shots than I expected.

Alan Wake 2 looked great on the display. A forest appeared a lush dark green in foggy weather, and would have almost been beautiful if it didn't double as a murder scene. I initially wished the game were a bit brighter, but I was able to change that in the software.

In our testing, we found that the Zephyrus G14 covers 114% of the DCI-P3 color space and 81.1% of the more challenging DCI-P3 gamut. That's a bit under the Dell G15 (though that's not an OLED screen), but beats the Strix G16. Razer's Blade 14 did the best of the bunch, reaching 161% of sRGB.

The Zephyrus came second place in brightness, at 392 nits. The Blade won out here at a glowing 465 nits.

Keyboard and Touchpad on the ROG Zephyrus G14

While the Zephyrus' keyboard isn't the most comfortable I've ever used, it's solid. On the monkeytype test, I hit 128 words per minute with 99% accuracy, which is about as well as I do. I felt myself hit the bottom of the key travel, but wasn't worrying about finger pain. While the keyboard never got tremendously hot, I did find myself getting a little balmy when I had my hand on the keyboard after the system was running for a bit.

The keyboard supports RGB, but it’s only single-zone. I would have preferred to see per-key lighting at this price point, though I think a single color does fit this system's understated design nicely. Above the keyboard, there are a few extra keys, like volume control and Armoury Crate, which are a bit awkward, but I got used to them.

The 3.2 x 5.1-inch touchpad on the Zephyrus G14 is sizable considering the device's footprint, which I appreciate; this laptop is just as likely to be used for some work as it is for gaming. You can always turn it off with the F9 function key if you’re going to use a mouse. The touchpad works, but the clicking is a bit stiff. I wish Asus went with haptics here.

Audio on the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14

I was pleasantly surprised by the speakers on the Zephyrus G14, as they proved decent for music and solid for gaming. Most gaming laptops offer more audio oomph than thin and lights, but with the Zephyrus' size, I expected less.

When I turned on Yellowcard's "Lights and Sounds," the song's rock guitars, violins, and snappy drums easily filled my room. The bass was a bit on the weak side, which is unfortunately to be expected, but the volume got very loud. Turning the volume up to 100% caused some distortion, but I didn't need to set it anywhere near that high for adequate loudness.

If you want to make some changes to the audio profile, Dolby Access, has Atmos settings, including a variety of equalizers. I found the default to work fine in most cases.

When I played Alan Wake 2, I found the speakers to be serviceable, though I kept them louder than I did while I listened to music. They balanced spooky ambient music as well as dialogue, though I could still hear the fans over the speakers.

Upgradeability of the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14

The base of the Zephyrus is held to the rest of the system with 11 Torx screws. Be careful to keep them organized — the screws at the front, under the palmrest, are smaller than the ones used for the rest of the base. Two of the screws are hidden under small black stoppers close to the hinge, These are smartly held in place with tabs, not adhesive, and are easy to put back.

Once those were out, I was able to get into the system pretty quickly with a prying tool.

While the RAM is soldered down to the motherboard, which is common with many smaller laptops these days, I was glad to see that there are still a handful of user-replaceable parts. The battery, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth module, and M.2 PCIe SSD are all accessible and replaceable.

Interestingly, Asus has a third fan in the Zephyrus. Beyond the two spinners that cool the CPU and GPU (as well as the liquid metal thermal interface), the third fan is designed to send "additional heat" to the right heatsinks and out of exhaust cutouts.

Battery Life on the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14

The battery life on the new Zephyrus wasn't incredible, especially considering previous versions ran for over 10 hours on our test. Asus has told us that future driver updates should improve longevity, but we can only review what we have.

The Zephyrus G14 ran for 6 hours and 45 minutes on our battery test, which involves web browsing, OpenGL tests, and video streaming over Wi-Fi with the screen set to 150 nits. Both the Blade 14 (8:34) and ROG Strix G16 (8:49) beat it, running over 8 and a half hours. The Dell G15 came in last at 5:51.

Heat on the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14

The Asus ROG Zephyrus didn't get too hot to the touch while we stress tested it with Metro Exodus, but you still will want to keep it on a desk or table.

The center of the keyboard, between the G and H keys, reached 108.5 degrees Fahrenheit, while the touchpad was a cool 87.4 F. The hottest point on the bottom measured 116 F.

Webcam on the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14

The 1080p webcam on the Zephyrus is useable, but not amazing. While it's color accurate, capturing my brown t-shirt, fading navy blue hoodie, and blue eyes correctly, I did notice some graininess. I don't think it would be too bad in a group chat, but filling the screen, it's easy to see.

The webcam supports an IR camera to log in with Windows Hello. There is no privacy shutter for the webcam, though a shortcut on the keyboard will turn the mic off.

Software and Warranty on the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14

Asus has a bit too much software pre-installed on the Zephyrus G14. While some of it is useful, others are duplicative or should simply be optional.

MyAsus and Armoury Crate are basically expected, though perhaps Asus should pick one or the other for gaming machines. Both of them include CPU and memory usage, though Armoury Crate goes deeper into GPU and fan speeds. Where the MyAsus app excels is with links to customer service and easy access to your serial number.

In addition, Armoury Crate adds RGB control with Aura Sync, gives you access to your game library, and has plenty of options for GPU modes and other performance profiles. Aura Creator should probably be built into Armoury Crate at this point, as it allows for more lighting effects.

Virtual Pet is a vestige of older Zephyrus laptops that could display a pet on the lid. Now, the pet just walks around the desktop until you close it. GlideX is meant to share your Windows screen across multiple devices, including Macs and tablets, though many features require a subscription. If I bought this laptop, these two would be the first to go.

There are also plenty of links in the Windows Start menu, including Spotify, Grammarly, Camo Studio, and the Luminar Neo AI Photo editor.

Asus sells the ROG Zephyrus G14 with a one-year warranty.

Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 Configurations

We tested the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 at $1,999. It’s config available at Best Buy, with an AMD Ryzen 9 8945HS, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070, 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD.

The base model is $1,599.99 with the same processor and display, but 16GB of RAM and an RTX 4060 (also at 90W).

Bottom Line

The Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 has a bit of an identity crisis. In theory, it's a gaming machine, but it looks and often feels like a productivity device. There's no reason a system can't do double duty (if someone is spending $2,000 on a gaming PC, it better do other things!), but to get into a thin, portable shell, Asus did give up performance.

Those who liked the G14 a bit thicker and with options for an RTX 4080 or RTX 4090 may be disappointed. Our review unit, with its RTX 4070 at 90W, performed similarly to a larger gaming laptop with an RTX 4060 in our testing. It was sometimes bested by the Dell G15 (5530) with an RTX 4060 at a higher wattage. So if you're shopping purely on performance, you can get more from a cheaper PC. The Asus ROG Strix G16 is similarly priced to our review unit and has more power and longer battery life, but it is a bigger machine.

But you also get a bright OLED display here, a fairly comfortable keyboard, solid speakers and a nice port selection. If you're going to use the Zephyrus for work or school often, those aren't to be overlooked. The Zephyrus G14 opens gaming up to people who care most about portability. If that’s you and you like the G14, just don’t expect the best gaming performance possible in this price range.

MORE: How to Buy a Gaming Laptop

MORE: Best Gaming PCs

MORE: Best Ultrabooks and Premium Laptops

Intel has released its open-source NPU Acceleration Library, enabling Meteor Lake AI PCs to run lightweight LLMs like TinyLlama. It's primarily intended for developers, but ordinary users with some coding experience could use it to get their AI chatbot running on Meteor Lake.

The library is out now on GitHub, and though Intel was supposed to write up a blog post about the NPU Acceleration Library, Intel Software Architect Tony Mongkolsmai shared it early on X. He showed a demo of the software running TinyLlama 1.1B Chat on an MSI Prestige 16 AI Evo laptop equipped with a Meteor Lake CPU and asked it about the pros and cons of smartphones and flip phones. The library works on both Windows and Linux.

Of course, since the NPU Acceleration Library is made for developers and not ordinary users, it's not a simple task to use it for your purposes. Mongkolsmai shared the code he wrote to get his chatbot running, and it's safe to say if you want the same thing running on your PC, you'll either need a decent understanding of Python or to retype every line shared in the image above and hope it works on your PC.

Since the NPU Acceleration Library is explicitly made for NPUs, this means that only Meteor Lake can run it at the moment. Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake CPUs due later this year should widen the field of compatible CPUs. Those upcoming CPUs deliver three times more AI performance over Meteor Lake, likely allowing for running even larger LLMs on laptop and desktop silicon.

The library is not fully featured yet and has only shipped with just under half its planned features. Most notably, it's missing mixed precision inference that can run on the NPU itself, BFloat16 (a popular data format for AI-related workloads), and NPU-GPU heterogeneous compute, presumably allowing both processors to work on the same AI tasks. The NPU Acceleration Library is brand-new, so it's unclear how impactful it will be, but fingers crossed that it will result in some new AI software for AI PCs.

Qualcomm has published a short video that shows a Snapdragon X Elite laptop outpacing an Intel Core Ultra 7 laptop by up to 10X in AI workloads. According to the video description, the unnamed Snapdragon X Elite model offers “a groundbreaking 45 TOPS NPU that delivers unparalleled AI capabilities.” The NPU (neural processing unit) tests run by Qualcomm included AI image generation in Stable Diffusion and GIMP. Of course, the tests used the onboard processors rather than the cloud.

The above video starts with side-by-side Stable Diffusion tests. While the Snapdragon X Elite laptop completed its summer fruits image generation task in 7.25s, it wasn’t until 22.26s that the Intel Core Ultra 7 laptop finished creating an image from the same prompt.

Qualcomm demonstrated that it had been reasonably fair in its side-by-side Stable Diffusion demo. As you can see from the screengrab below, the Snapdragon designers made sure the v1.5 of the image generator was “running on the most efficient configuration” for the Intel chip, splitting the processing between the Meteor Lake CPU, NPU, and GPU as appropriate. Please note that the Qualcomm machine seems to have benefitted from a specially optimized Stable Diffusion release, though. 

EDIT: Qualcomm shared the details of the config with us: 

• Both Stable Diffusion & Fast Stable Diffusion on Snapdragon X Elite are v1.5 in this demo.
• The Intel Core Ultra system is also Stable Diffusion 1.5 and configured based on: GitHub - GIMP AI plugins with OpenVINO Backend and user_guide_for_windos_users · GitHub.

Again, in GIMP, Qualcomm set up the two machines to do some AI image generation. This time, the prompt was “majestic lion basking in the golden afternoon sun.” We see the Snapdragon X Elite machine’s AI plugin, using the Qualcomm AI Stack, finish processing in a fraction of the time it takes the Intel OpenVINO plugin to complete the same task. Qualcomm asserts the demo shows its 45 TOPS packing chip can outpace the x86 rival by generating 10X more images in a given timeframe.

Perhaps it isn’t that surprising that the upcoming Qualcomm chip triumphs so convincingly in any NPU tests. The Snapdragon X Elite has an officially touted 45 TOPS to tackle AI workloads, while Intel’s official materials suggest that the Core Ultra series “delivers up to 34 TOPS” in a best-case scenario.

Meteor Lake was, of course, Intel’s first processor family with an integrated NPU, and it has already set out its stall to leapfrog its performance with the next generation – Arrow Lake (desktop) and Lunar Lake (laptop). We learned at CES that these chips are "in the deep and final stages" of development. Most importantly, concerning today’s story, Intel says its Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake CPUs, which are due later this year, will triple AI performance via improvements in GPU and NPU architectures.

A few days ago, we also spotted a Snapdragon X Elite chip in the Geekbench database, delivering convincing and top-x86 mobile chip rivaling performance. Overall it looks like Arm is going to make an even bigger impact on the mobile market soon. 

Edit 2/27/24 2:05pm PT: Added details from Qualcomm about the test configuration.

Intel is in the process of securing at least $2 billion in equity funding for its new fab in Ireland, reports Bloomberg, citing people familiar with the matter. The company has engaged an advisor and is currently seeking potential investors for the project.

Intel's Fab 34 near Leixlip, Ireland, is currently the only high-volume semiconductor production facility in Europe using extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography. The fab produces chips on Intel 4 process technology (previously known as Intel's 7nm node), which is currently used to build compute tiles for Intel's Core Ultra 'Meteor Lake' CPUs for client PCs and is expected to be used for some of the next-generation Xeon CPUs. 

By today's standards, $2 billion is not a huge sum of money, and it is not enough to build a brand-new fab. However, it is enough to expand or upgrade an existing facility. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that Intel is looking forward to expanding its Leixlip site either to increase its output or to adopt a newer process technology, such as Intel 3, Intel 20A, and Intel 18A. Keeping in mind that Intel needs more production capacity both for its own products and for customers of its Intel Foundry Services (IFS) contract chipmaking unit, both assumptions are realistic. 

In 2022, Intel entered into an agreement with Brookfield Infrastructure Partners, which committed to investing up to $15 billion for a 49% stake in Intel's manufacturing expansion at the Ocotillo campus in Chandler, Arizona.  

Under the terms of the agreement with Brookfield, both companies intend to jointly invest $30 billion in the continued expansion of the site, with Intel covering 51% and Brookfield contributing 49% of the overall project cost. Initially, Intel had earmarked $20 billion for its Fab 52 and Fab 62, but this amount increased to $30 billion because of the collaboration with Brookfield. As a result, the partnership with Brookfield has provided Intel with an additional $15 billion in free cash flow, enabling the company to allocate more funds to its new fabs without incurring new debt. Furthermore, this arrangement has allowed Intel to spend more money on other ventures (and/or keep its CapEx in check). This deal with Brookfield Infrastructure Partners sets a precedent for Intel's current fundraising efforts for its Irish facility.

If you're looking for a laptop that's thin, light, and runs Windows, you have a lot of choice. Plenty of the best ultrabooks are aimed straight at you. The Asus Zenbook 14 OLED delivers on the popular clamshell form factor with Intel's latest Core Ultra chips, and offers up an impressive 32GB of RAM and 1TB of storage for $1,299.99. 

With OLED in the name, Asus should deliver a colorful display, and it does. But we also found some tradeoffs. The keyboard, while functional, wasn't as tactile as we'd like, and we found the system very difficult to open (though the only option to upgrade is the storage — the RAM is soldered).

Still, for those not looking to open the laptop (hi there, most people), the Zenbook 14 OLED otherwise delivers a pretty solid experience – that is, as long as you don't have it working too hard for too long.

Design of the Asus Zenbook 14 OLED

The Zenbook 14 OLED isn't a showstopper, but it largely feels premium and looks the part – well, except for the fingerprints.

Asus doesn't specify exactly what metal the lid is made of, but it's a gorgeous shade of dark blue. There's a large Asus logo with a sort of starfleet-esque theme in a tone-on-tone blue. The Asus Zenbook name is printed small in the bottom corner. If you weren't looking for it, you wouldn't know this is an Asus notebook at all. I dig the style, however, there is a bit of flex to the lid if you squeeze it.

The problem is that the laptop’s surface is an absolute fingerprint magnet, so keep a microfiber cloth handy to get rid of any oils. While the design is very similar to what we saw on last year's Zenbook S13 OLED, it's missing the  "plasma ceramic" material that made it feel so durable. I wish Asus would've carried that over to this laptop.

LIfting the lid reveals a solid "ponder blue" deck, the 14-inch, 2880 x 1800 display, and an island-style keyboard. It's all very simple, very subtle, very much a laptop. Asus isn't reinventing the wheel here.

Asus has crammed just a few ports onto the laptop. The left side has a USB Type-A port for legacy peripherals, while the right side features two Thunderbolt 4 ports, HDMI, and a headphone jack. In the box, Asus includes a USB Type-A to Ethernet adapter, which seems like an odd inclusion for a laptop in 2024, especially when there's only one USB-A port.

The Zenbook measures 12.30 x 8.67 x 0.59 inches and weighs 2.82 pounds. The HP Spectre x360 14 is heavier at 3.19 pounds and slightly larger at 12.35 x 8.68 x 0.67 inches. Apple's MacBook Air, another light clamshell, is smaller and lighter at 11.97 x 8.46 x 0.44 inches and 2.7 pounds.

Asus Zenbook 14 OLED Specifications

Productivity Performance on the Asus Zenbook 14 OLED

We tested the Asus Zenbook 14 OLED with an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H, 32GB of RAM, and a 1TB M.2 SSD. In general, it performed well, though we found it's better at faster, bursty workloads than long-term performance.

On Geekbench 5.5, the Zenbook did solidly, reaching a single-core score of 1,809 and a multi-core score of 10,962. It outperformed the HP Spectre x360 14 with the same processor (1,689 single-core, 9,819 multi-core). The MacBook Air with M2 won out on single-core (1,932) but not multi-core (8,919).

Asus is using a speedy boot drive. On our file copy test, it transferred 25GB of file at 1,279.88 MBps. The Spectre was slightly faster at 1,362.60 MBps, while the MacBook Air trailed them at 958.85 MBps.

With Handbrake, we have computers transcode a 4K video to 1080p. The Zenbook was the fastest of the group on this test, at 6 minutes and 17 seconds. Meanwhile, the Spectre took longer at 7:30 and the MacBook Air needed 7:52.

We saw the Zenbook 14 throttle pretty hard on our looped Cinebench test. While it started with a high score of 13,843.45, it quickly catered and eventually landed in the high 8,000s. This is probably fine for bursty work, but anything that needs sustained performance will probably perform more like a Core Ultra 5.

During this stress test, performance cores ran at an average of 1.96 GHz, while the efficiency cores reached 1.59 GHz. Those are down from much higher peaks, however, and show the throttling. The average measured core temperature was 67.95 degrees Celsius.

Display on the Asus Zenbook 14 OLED

The 14-inch, 2880 x 1800 OLED touchscreen on the Zenbook 14 looks great. And it should, if Asus is going to put OLED in the laptop's name.

The trailer for Dev Patel's Monkey Man looked excellent on the laptop. In an early scene in a club, purple and blue lighting were vibrant and lifelike, while action scenes shot at night with warm lighting were still clear and crisp.

Asus' OLED screen covers 115.3% of the sRGB gamut and 81.7% of the DCI-P3 color space, putting it just a tad behind the HP Spectre x360 14. Both of those Windows machines did better here than the 13-inch MacBook Air, which doesn't use an OLED panel.

But where Asus lost out was on brightness. The 354.4 nits on our light meter isn't shabby, and will be fine for most people. But the Spectre hit 366.2 nits, and Mac blew them both out of the water at 489 nits of brightness.

Keyboard, Touchpad, and Stylus on the Asus Zenbook 14 OLED

Asus' keyboard leaves some room for improvement. I like the layout, including the inverted T arrow keys and the full-sized Shift keys on both sides (you'd be surprised how often one is cut off).

But in use, the keys felt a bit mushy. As I typed this review and, crucially to our usual testing, took a typing test, I found that the keys were soft and didn't pop up the way I'd like. It took me several tries to get up to 116 words per minute on the monkeytype typing test, as I kept making mistakes that led me to backspace and fix them. Eventually I hit my usual 2% error rate, but it took some time to get used to.

The touchpad is sufficiently spacious, though I noticed a bit of friction against the pads of my fingers. I'd like to see Asus move to a haptic touchpad, which I prefer in premium notebooks, but in general this one is fine, if slightly stiff. It reacted well to multi-touch gestures.

Asus includes a stylus with 4,096 degrees of pressure sensitivity in the box. It's a full-sized pen with two barrel buttons and one on the top, and comes with four interchangeable tips. The pen has a USB Type-C port hidden inside for charging, so at least you don't have to worry about hard-to-find coin batteries.

The stylus is comfortable enough to hold, though you'll need to make sure you don't lose it, since there's no magnetic attachment. Additionally, it's a bit weird to use the stylus on a clamshell laptop in the first place; it makes more sense on a 2-in-1 or tablet. But since the display can fold back flat, you could reach over the keyboard and use it that way. (You could also turn the machine around with the keyboard on the other side, but that means going into settings and turning the OS upside down.)

There's no software specifically for the stylus, which is fine with me. If you pair the pen with Bluetooth, there are options to adjust the shortcut button on top and the barrel buttons in Settings > Bluetooth & devices > Pen & Windows Ink.

Audio on the Asus Zenbook 14 OLED

The Harmon Kardon speakers on the Zenbook 14 OLED are loud for their size, if not totally balanced.

As Jade Bird's "Burn The Hard Drive" filled my office with clear vocals and snappy drums, there really was no bass to speak of, which is common on thin laptops. Some pianos in the background were drowned out by synthesizer effects and the drums.

I took to the Dolby Access app to try to make some adjustments, but I found the various music equalizers didn't make a massive difference. Switching to dynamic mode, which adjusts the EQ based on what you're listening to, pumped up the volume even more but didn't do much to balance the sound.

Upgradeability of the Asus Zenbook 14 OLED

There's not much you can upgrade or repair on the Zenbook 14. Never mind the fact that the RAM is soldered down. What's worse is that it's so difficult to open it at all.

There are six tiny Torx screws around the case: four by the wrist rest, one on each side, and one at the back. But even with those out, the bottom wouldn't come loose. We pried off the rubberized feet, because Asus has an unfortunate history of hiding screws there. The good news is there were no screws, so don't do that! It's basically impossible to put them back on unless you are ready to break out the glue.

But considering how much trouble we had opening this — and we've opened a lot of laptops – consider it non-upgradeable for most people. For what it's worth, Asus tells us the only part meant to be replaced by the owner is the SSD.

Battery Life on the Asus Zenbook 14 OLED

The Asus Zenbook 14 was long lasting on our battery test. It ran for 12 hours and 21 minutes as it streamed video, browsed the web, and ran OpenGL tests at 150 nits of brightness. Only the MacBook Air, at 14:06, beat it.

HP's 14-inch Spectre x360 came in at 11:01.

Heat on the Asus Zenbook 14 OLED

We took skin temperature measurements on the Asus Zenbook 14 while running the Cinebench R23 multiple times to get an idea of how hot it gets under load.

The keyboard, between the G and H keys, reached 99.1 degrees Fahrenheit, while the touchpad measured a cooler 86.5 F. On the bottom of the laptop, the hottest spot measured 110 F.

Webcam on the Asus Zenbook 14 OLED

The 1080p webcam on the Asus Zenbook 14 OLED is pretty decent. It's not the best I've tried, but it's solid at color reproduction and shows off plenty of detail, even if there's a bit of  grain if you look closely.

In a photo I took at home, an orange shirt I wore and my blue eyes contrasted nicely, and I could make out all of the books on the shelves in the room behind me. It also accurately displayed the questionable shade of green my office is painted, despite the warm lighting.

The IR webcam lets you log in with Windows Hello, which is a good option because there is no fingerprint reader.

For privacy, there's a webcam shudder. On one occasion, I did end up only sliding it part way, leaving part of the lens uncovered. It's not a dealbreaker, and even when you only slide it 99% of the way, that's enough to block the entire lens. But ideally, it should probably be more on/off than a slider cover.

Software and Warranty on the Asus Zenbook 14 OLED

Asus has quite a bit of software preinstalled on the Zenbook 14, which is pervasive enough that it gets into the Edge browser's bookmarks.

MyAsus is somewhat helpful, in that it provides quick system info and shows you component usage, as well as offering adjustments to fan profiles (which I suspect most people won't dig into). It also has plenty of connections to Asus customer support. But there's also ScreenXpert, Asus' custom app switcher and window manager, as well as GlideX, software to share your screen across devices. Additionally, Asus puts a trial version of McAfee on the system.

In Microsoft Edge, Asus has bookmarks to the Asus Software Portal, a link to download MyAsus (which is already on the PC), and to McAfee LiveSafe.

That's beyond the additions found in the Windows Start menu from Microsoft itself, including links to download Spotify, Camo Studio and LinkedIn.

Asus sells the Zenbook 14 OLED with a one-year warranty.

Asus Zenbook 14 OLED Configurations

We tested the Asus Zenbook 14 OLED with an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H processor, 32GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, and a 2880 x 1800 touch screen. It's $1,299.99 and comes with a stylus included. 

As of this writing, this is the only configuration available in the U.S.

Bottom Line

The Asus Zenbook 14 OLED is a portable clamshell laptop with a lovely screen and good value for the price. $1,299 gets you a Core Ultra 7, 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. It's not a budget machine, but typically those kindsa of specs require some upgrades and come at a higher price.

Our review unit proved fast in benchmarks, though if you're doing tasks that take a long time, you may experience some thermal throttling like we did. The OLED touchscreen is lovely, though I'm not sure I necessarily see the point of including a stylus with a clamshell laptop.

Similar laptops do have advantages over the Zenbook. The 13-inch MacBook Air with M2, for instance, lasts longer on a charge and is both smaller and lighter. However, it doesn't offer anOLED touchscreen and a comparably specced system is $1,799. The HP Spectre x360 14 is a flexible 2-in-1 — the type of laptop you may actually want to use a stylus on — and has a similarly nice display.

But if you want a clamshell laptop with a nice display, long battery life and good specs for the price, you should consider the Zenbook if you're going the Windows direction.

Intel has contracted Samsung to supply it LPDDR5X devices that it will use as on-package memory for its upcoming codenamed Lunar Lake processors due later this year, according to a DigiTimes report citing South Korean media. If the information is correct, this is a big design win for Samsung, as Intel will supply tens of millions of Lunar Lake CPUs over the next few years. Keep in mind that this is a leak and could be inaccurate. 

Intel's Lunar Lake MX platform is reportedly designed primarily for thin-and-light laptops. It is set to come with either 16GB or 32GB of LPDDR5X-8533 memory-on-package, reducing the platform's footprint and improving performance compared to traditional platforms featuring either memory modules or soldered-down memory chips. Given that Lunar Lake is set to support on-package memory exclusively, Samsung could sell a boatload of its LPDDR5X-8533 memory products to Intel as the company's laptop platforms are sold in tens of millions of units quantities. 

Meanwhile, we do not know whether Samsung will be the exclusive LPDDR5X supplier for Lunar Lake. Since Intel will sell Lunar Lake processors with on-package memory, it will clearly sell these products with pre-tested/validated memory devices. Yet, nothing would also stop Intel from validating LPDDR5X from Micron and SK Hynix. 

Intel has touted Lunar Lake processors as featuring a brand-new microarchitecture designed from the ground up to offer breakthrough performance-per-watt efficiency. Based on recent slides, Intel's Lunar Lake MX platform will rely on a multi-chiplet Foveros-based design consisting of a CPU + GPU chiplet, a system-on-chip tile, and two memory packages. The CPU chiplet is expected to pack up to eight general-purpose cores (four high-performance Lion Cove and four Skymont energy-efficient cores), 12MB cache, up to eight Xe2 GPU clusters, and up to a six-tile NPU 4.0 AI accelerator. The platform is projected to have an 8W power envelope for fanless systems and a 17W – 30W envelope for designs with decent active cooling systems.  

For over three years, Apple has used on-package memory for all of its Apple Silicon M-series chips for Macs. With Intel's Lunar Lake MX, this may become an industry-wide trend for thin-and-light laptops. Meanwhile, systems that require configurability, repairability, and upgradeability will continue to use SODIMMs based on commodity DDR5 memory, as well as recently introduced LPCAMM2 modules featuring LPDDR5X that brings together high performance and low power consumption.

Minisforum has unveiled several new mini PCs, including its first Intel Core Ultra powered device, and the first with a discrete AMD Radeon RX 7600M XT GPU. At CES 2024 in Las Vegas it is also showcasing its recently revealed V3 AMD 2-in-1 tablet, MoDT motherboards, and Mini Workstation MS-01 designs.

The new Minisforum UH185 Ultra is touted as the firm’s flagship product for 2024. No prizes for guessing what processor lies within this mini PC – of course, it is the Intel Core Ultra 9 185H. This 16C / 22T processor boosts to up to 5.1 GHz on a 45W power budget and features an integrated Arc GPU with eight Xe cores running at up to 2.35 GHz. It is the best of the current Meteor Lake crop that is also starting to arrive in top-end laptops at CES 2024, as well as the best Asus ROG NUC configuration.

Another feature of the Minisforum UH185 Ultra that immediately grabs your attention is its integrated touch screen with an FHD webcam sitting just above it. The included stand can angle the screen and camera to be useful for video conferencing, use as an interactive system monitor, or for purely cosmetic projects.

Some other specs of the Minisforum UH185 Ultra worth mentioning are its dual 5G RJ45 network ports, and dual USB4 interfaces supporting DP and Thunderbolt bridge. For expansion, users can configure up to 96GB of RAM via dual DDR5-5600 SODIMM slots, and there are dual M.2 PCIe4.0 x4 SSD slots and an SD card slot.

The Minisforum UH185 Ultra is also branded as an AI PC, with its built-in NPU. Sadly, at the time of writing, we don’t have information to share about this device’s pricing or availability.

Minisforum has at last delivered a significant upgrade to its HX series mini PCs which sport discrete graphics and are thus of particular interest to those wanting a small form factor PC with a little more gaming potential. The new Minisforum HX200G pairs the undeniable charms of the AMD Ryzen R9 7945HX ‘Dragon Range’ processor with 16C / 32 T and boosting up to 5.4 GHz, with a Radeon RX 7600M XT discrete graphics chip and its 32CU RDNA3 compute units. That mobile RDNA 3 GPU is supposed to deliver performance on a par with or better than an RTX 3060 desktop card. Previously HX mini PC iterations maxed out with an RX 6600M.

Other features of the Minisforum HX200G include its M.2 2280 PCIe 5.0 SSD support and some pretty big claims regarding cooling performance. According to Minisforum, this powerful new mini PC “boasts the most robust cooling, lowest noise, and maximum performance release among discrete graphics Mini PCs.” It qualifies its statement by describing the cooling system which features employing a “CPU+GPU dual-liquid gold cooling system,” a 4-fan design cooling up to 120W in performance mode, and a max noise level below 45dB. Of course, such claims need independent testing.

Like the UH185 Ultra mini PC, detailed above, we don’t have availability or pricing for the Minisforum HX200G as yet. The tech specs are quite thin on the ground too, but hopefully, these things will be fleshed out in due course.

Other products Minisforum is seeking to promote at CES 2024 (Booth 2203 – 3305 Westgate) include its interesting first tablet hybrid PC, the V3 2-in-1. We have covered this device previously, but it is still a pre-release product packing an AMD Ryzen 8000 ‘Hawk Point’ APU and isn’t expected to become available to the public until the end of March. The firm is also showcasing the AR900i MoDT motherboard, the EM780 pocket Mini PC  (0.25 liters), the UM780 XTX mini PC, and the Mini Workstation MS-01.

Acer has a trio of productivity-focused laptops here at CES, as Acer fills out more of its Swift lineup with Intel's Core Ultra (Meteor Lake) processors. These include a new Swift Go 14, Swift Go 16, and the Swift X 14.

If you're seeing the Swift Go 14 and are thinking, "hey, didn't Acer just launch one of those in December?", then yes, you're right. Alongside the two newer models, Acer's Swift Go 14 is getting additional configurations and features, including a touchpad with a built-in media remote.

The new Swift Go 14 (SFG14-73/T) will be Intel Evo verified, and feature an IMAX Enhanced Certified display (at least, at the top-end 2880 x 1800, 90 Hz OLED display option). The last computer we sat an IMAX-verified display on was the HP Spectre Foldable.

Acer's new Swift Go 14's media control is its standout feature (though we've even seen calculators and screens in touchpads, so it's not the first time we've seen anything like this). In an early sample we got to check out, you could see all of the symbols on the touchpad, but I'm told that on final versions, you won't be able to see it unless it's in use. Acer told us it should work not just in streaming and video apps, but also with videos playing in the browser.

This is also one of the first laptops we've seen where the manufacturer is offering both U and H-series Intel Core Ultra processors, up to the Core Ultra 9 185H and Ultra 7 155U.

The larger sibling, the Swift Go 16, is fairly similar, but it doesn't get the media touchpad. It has the same CPU and integrated graphics options, the same RAM and storage limits, and the same 1440p webcam. In fact, the Swift Go 16 also gets an IMAX-certified display in its 3200 x 2000, 120 Hz panel. And both sizes also have the same ports: a pair of Thunderbolt 4 over USB Type-C, HDMI 2.1, and a microSD card reader.

The third system, the Acer Swift X 14, is a bit different in that it's aimed at creatives that need graphics power. It's still using Core Ultra processors (Ultra 7 155H or Ultra 5 125 H), but will have graphics options including an RTX 3050 and RTX 40-series graphics up to an RTX 4070. The Swift X will come with Studio drivers installed. 

Acer's aluminum chassis on the Swift X can finally be opened to 180 degrees, but there aren't a ton of physical changes. It actually has a few spec downgrades from the other Swift models, including a 1080p webcam instead of 1440p and Wi-Fi 6E without any options for Wi-Fi 7.

The Swift Go 14 and 16 are both set to launch in March in the US starting at $749.99 and $799.99 respectively, with European launches(and, in the case of the smaller laptop, a Chinese launch) in February. The Swift X 14 will launch in February starting at $1,399.99.

A promotional image showing an MSI-branded handheld gaming PC has appeared online via seasoned hardware leaker @wxnod. We also have a pair of pre-launch benchmark spills to mull over today showing variable performance for the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H (Meteor Lake) chip inside the MSI handheld, thanks to @Olrak29.

MSI teased its first foray into the burgeoning handheld PC gaming market yesterday, with some oblique close-ups of the device. The newly leaked picture, if genuine, shows that MSI’s handheld looks very similar to the Asus ROG Ally. The MSI Claw is scheduled for a full official reveal at CES 2024 next week.

In our comparison image, showing both handhelds from a similar offset angle, you can see that the Asus and MSI machines have more than a passing resemblance. The control layout, even down to the small buttons flanking the edges of the screen, is almost identical. Moreover, device ventilation and sculpting design choices look very similar.

Beauty is only skin deep, though, as we know these two handheld powerhouses are based upon very different SoCs. Asus uses the tried and trusted AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme processor, which is a tuned Ryzen 7 7840U (Phoenix) APU. Meanwhile, MSI surprised us with its (not officially confirmed) choice of Intel Meteor Lake processor. Recently people have been pondering over the Phoenix vs Meteor Lake battle in the mobile arena, and what we have seen makes the probable choice by MSI not that surprising.

Purported MSI Claw benchmarks

Interestingly a pair of MSI Claw system benchmarks have appeared in the Geekbench online results database. The results seem to be taken from the same machine / model, designated the “Micro-Star International Co., Ltd. Claw A1M.” The two tests were run just 40 minutes or so apart, and perhaps it was done by the same user fiddling with settings and checking performance differences on a single machine.

The MSi Claw performance differences we can observe are quite significant between the two runs. Geekbench records that the Windows 11 ‘Balanced’ Power Plan was being used in both test runs, but we don’t know what else might have changed. One test could be from the MSI Claw when mains powered, the other from when it ran on battery, for example. Other system tweaks and changes may have been applied too.

To create the above comparison table we inserted the best and worst Asus ROG Ally single-core scoring samples tested over the last couple of days. The MSI results come from a sample of two, but the ROG Ally devices are the best / worst from a sample of about 25 devices.

We also found some Geekbench Compute results for the MSI Claw, with Vulkan scores of up to 37,165. This result also seemed to be one that wouldn’t be out of place among the multitude of recent ROG Ally Compute Vulkan API test results. 37K is at the higher end of the range of ROG Ally scores, though.

From the tests, if they are genuine, we should expect the MSI handheld to be a good challenger to the AMD Phoenix-powered throng. However, Geekbench tests aren’t great indicator of gaming performance, the primary purpose of these handheld devices. In other words, it would be best to wait and see if Meteor Lake handhelds have any winning qualities compared to the existing AMD Ryzen 7040 handhelds before putting in a pre-order, for example. Hold fire until third-party reviews are in from sites you can trust.

Among the improvements seen with Intel's Meteor Lake launch has been a great jump in power and efficiency in their integrated graphics. The  Arc graphics inside the latest Intel CPU can perform better than the competing Radeon 780M iGPU from AMD, and this may be the first time Intel is beating AMD in integrated graphics. 

So, how much of an improvement is Intel's Meteor Lake integrated graphics compared to past generations? Phoronix sought out the answer to this question and published it in the form of a set of iGPU benchmarks across 5 Intel laptop CPUs, each from a different generation. All testing was conducted in Linux, like their past iGPU testing and on-launch Meteor Lake Linux CPU testing.

The GPU testing being discussed here isn't quite as thorough as that prior 370 CPU benchmark run, but still varied enough to paint a clear picture of Intel iGPU evolution from late 2018 to late 2023.

Below, we'll be including two key graphics from Phoronix's testing: one for power consumption from each CPU during testing, and another providing the geomean average of all test results combined for each CPU. Afterward, we'll discuss some of the specific games and synthetic benchmarks used, with full results available at the original source if they're needed.

First, the main benchmarking results show some truly impressive generational gains from Intel. 

This is actually Intel's biggest iGPU jump in quite some time, and the combined test results of games and staple 3D benchmarks help paint a clear picture of that difference. Overall, the Core Ultra 7 155H's Arc graphics are 33% faster than the Core i7 1280P's on average. Compared to the old Core i7 8565U, it's more than quintupled.

Titles used in these benchmarks include Enemy Territory: Legacy, Tesseract, Unvanquished, and Warsow. Meanwhile, synthetic benchmarks like 3DMark Wild Life Extreme and GravityMark were used. All three of Unigine's Heaven, Valley, and Superposition benchmarks are also included in the results above.

Power consumption monitoring during testing also showed that even at full utilization, Intel's latest generation operates at about half the average power of last-gen. 

These are impressive gains in power efficiency, and may even start making room for, say . . . Intel iGPUs in entry-level handhelds, akin to the AMD APUs already common in that space? This kind of power efficiency at a 24-Watt average bodes well for low-power devices in general, in any case. For more details, see Phoronix's complete list of test results.

LG announced the refresh of its LG Gram line of laptops on Thursday, Dec. 28, including a new LG Gram Pro line that can optionally come in a 2-in-1 "hybrid" tablet-laptop form factor -- a design that's also popular for laptops like the Lenovo Legion Go.

Below are the official renders of this new line of LG Gram laptops. The maximum RAM configuration for all refreshed LG Gram models is up to 32 GB of LPDDR5X RAM running at up to 7467 MT/s, while dual PCIe 4.0 drives are limited to 1 TB on Gram and 2 TB on Gram Pro. Full specifications and configuration options are available here.

• LG Gram 14 — The lowest-end model. It only comes in a 60 Hz, 1080p configuration with no option for discrete graphics and a 350 nit LCD screen—only Arc iGPUs for the entire non-Pro line.
• LG Gram 15 — Nearly the same as the 14-inch model, but now also offers an improved LCD IPS screen option.
• LG Gram 16 — Where the non-Pro LG gram line gets bumped up to 2560 x 1600, and an option for a 400 nit brightness screen with VRR support.
• LG Gram 17 — Pretty much identical to Gram 16, but 17-inch. 
• LG Gram Pro 16-Inch — The entry-level Pro model features options for either a 1600p IPS LCD screen or an 1800p OLED screen. Both are rated for 400 nits brightness and support VRR, though OLED only goes up to 120 Hz while IPS reaches 144 Hz. However, the lower response time inherent to OLED should still provide a more responsive gaming experience at 120 Hz. Supports RTX 3050 dGPU config.
• LG Gram Pro 17-Inch — Nearly the same as 16-inch, but no option for OLED and equipped with a slightly larger screen.
• LG Gram Pro 2-In-1 16-Inch — Same configuration options as 16-inch LG gGramPro, but in the 2-in-1 form factor. Limited solely to Arc iGPU.

The Meteor Lake Arc iGPU steps in for models without a discrete GPU. Meteor Lake Arc has recently dethroned the Radeon 780M iGPU as the top performer in Windows and takes the iGPU crown in Linux, too. This makes the non-Pro LG gram laptops considerably more appealing than they would be otherwise since they don't have an option for OLED or discrete GPUs.

Meanwhile, the options for high-refresh OLED and Nvidia RTX 3050 graphics on the Gram Pro models make it somewhat more appealing, though. Unfortunately, the 2-in-1 model is limited solely to the Arc iGPU.

Seeing more entry-level laptops get boosted to levels where they can provide competent modern gaming experiences is always nice to see, though. Even the 14-inch model has truly competent integrated graphics, a considerable improvement over past-generation Intel laptops.

Early adopters of laptops featuring Intel's new Core Ultra laptop processors have enjoyed noticeable performance and efficiency improvements after a simple BIOS update. Golden Pig Upgrade and UltrabookReview were among the first to get their hands on a Meteor Lake-based laptop and their separate testing suggests there are double-digit performance gains to be had from updating from the earliest firmware versions.

The aforementioned reviewers independently confirmed a certain issue with the CPU power delivery, resulting in lower performance during tests. UltrabookReview's Andrei Girbea shared an HWiNFO log indicating that the CPU power draw wasn't enough to perform at its full potential. Golden Pig Upgrade made the same conclusion independently in his review.

Shortly after some early tests and reviews had been published, Intel sent a firmware patch to OEMs who subsequently rolled out new BIOS files to reviewers. Both reviewers mentioned above have already completed some re-tests and concluded that the new BIOS fixes the noted issues, facilitating better benchmark results.

The performance improvements observed

Golden Pig identified the issue with the Core Ultra 7 155H CPU and mentions in the comments section of his video that there was a power scheduling problem that reduced the CPU performance while benchmarking. Intel's freshly patched BIOS was observed to correct this issue via an updated PCode. You can see an informative analysis and before / after BIOS update comparison of the Core Ultra 7 155H from Golden Pig Upgrade, above.

UltrabookReview's Girbea also received the patched BIOS and updated his review with the new results, which you can check out below.

In the comments of his review, Girbea said that his Zenbook 14 was shipped with BIOS 201. After the review, he received the BIOS 203 from Asus and retested it, showing many improvements during benchmarking. He stress-tested the notebook with Cinebench R23 while recording data with HWiNFO. The logs show that the Core Ultra 155H CPU with the updated BIOS drew a 50-watt peak during the 10-minute benchmark loop. 

During its best run in Performance Mode, CPU power draw was around 35 watts and gradually dropped to 28 watts after 5-6 minutes. The temperature was around the higher end of 70 degrees Celsius while maintaining 40dB fan noise levels.  The Cinebench R23's result showed a 12.26% improvement, achieving a score of 13873 points.

All in a day's work with pre-production samples

Usually, companies like Intel and AMD provide platform-optimized BIOS files for OEMs to roll out with. However, pre-production models may still need to be ironed out after being received by the reviewers. Intel identified the issue after the review was posted and rolled out a patch to respective OEMs who provided the BIOS to the reviewers testing these Meteor Lake notebooks. 

Speaking of pre-production review unit woes, Girbea mentioned an existing issue where XeSS didn’t work where it should while testing certain games under certain settings and hence will update the review once more, when he finds the cause of this.

The notebook reviewed by Girbea was an Asus Zenbook 14 OLED UX3405MA with an Intel Evo-certified Core Ultra 155H CPU and Intel Arc iGPU, it featured 32GB LPDDR5-7500 memory and a 1TB PCIe 4.0 SSD. A model with this specification can be ordered for $1,299.99 with a one-year warranty.

ASRock Industrial has launched one of the first Meteor Lake NUCs with its NUC Ultra 100 (via LinuxGizmos). The NUC comes with up to a Core Ultra 7 155H, and users may optionally add up to 96GB of RAM and two SSDs. Although oriented towards business, professional, and industrial use cases, the NUC Ultra 100 is presumably just as good at gaming as we've seen with mobile Meteor Lake chips.

The NUC Ultra 100 can be configured with a Core Ultra 5 125H or a Core Ultra 7 155H. Since the 125H has just four P-cores to the 155's six, we can probably expect the 155H to have significantly more raw horsepower in multi-threaded workloads. That will especially be true for a NUC since there's more than enough power and cooling to go around.

Despite its small form factor, there's a considerable amount of configurability for the NUC Ultra 100. Users can add up to two PCIe 4.0 SSDs (provided they have the right size) and 96GB of DDR5 RAM clocked at 5,600MHz. 

Speaking of graphics, the NUC Ultra 100 has no shortage of display options thanks to its two HDMI 2.0b ports and its DisplayPort-capable USB4 and USB 3.2 Type-C ports. These displays can drive a 4K monitor at 60Hz, though 1440p at 144Hz and 1080p at 240Hz should also be possible per HDMI 2.0b's official specs.

Regarding networking, there are two 2.5 gigabit Ethernet ports, but no Wi-Fi card is included. Though, considering the target audience for this NUC, that makes sense. There is an M.2 slot inside where a Wi-Fi card can be installed, though ASRock doesn't make any claims about compatibility with the latest Wi-Fi 7 standard.

Currently, there's no price tag attached to the NUC Ultra 100, as ASRock Industrial has buyers send in a product inquiry to ask for pricing, which is standard for business-to-business dealings. It's unlikely this NUC will ever hit store shelves, but if you're craving Intel's latest chip inside a mini PC, there will be other options. Asus is apparently launching its own Meteor Lake NUC, and a Chinese-exclusive NUC is confirmed to launch on January 11.

Just yesterday, we looked into Phoronix's 370 CPU benchmark run of the Core Ultra 7 155H and Ryzen 7 7840U under Linux. Phoronix has now followed up on this CPU testing with benchmarks now focused on iGPU performance, which start making the Intel CPU look a lot more compelling in Linux than it did prior. Both CPUs were (and are still) being tested in an Acer Swift Go 14 laptop (Intel) and a Framework laptop (AMD), respectively.

While the CPU benchmark results gave AMD a roughly 28% overall lead, things may dice out a little differently with the iGPUs involved.

With iGPUs in play, the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H reveals itself as holder of the iGPU performance crown under Ubuntu Linux. AMD isn't far behind, the Radeon 780M does indeed lose to Meteor Lake's Arc graphics by 8% on average. The Iris Xe graphics on the Core i7 1280P, meanwhile, are being hard-diffed by 62%, which is pretty nice.

While AMD is sure to retaliate, Intel's Arc iGPUs are starting to put up some real competition against AMD in this integrated GPU space.

When Phoronix shifts over to testing Intel iGPUs only in GPU compute benchmarks under Linux, the performance improvements over last-gen become even more clear. Arc graphics are now clearing Iris Xe graphics with an over two-fold improvement.

Finally, while CPU power consumption was higher for the Core Ultra 7 155H in CPU-bound testing, power consumption was actually lower than AMD for this CPU in this iGPU benchmark run. For more detailed data points on the tests run and particular workloads that favor AMD, consider Phoronix's full piece.

For now, it's fair to say that Meteor Lake Intel CPUs are looking a lot better for Linux now that we can see how much iGPU scaling has improved. Beating the Radeon 780M iGPU is pretty impressive, too, considering it's capable of powering modern ~1200p gaming experiences on devices like the ROG Ally.

Within a week of Intel Meteor Lake's Dec. 14 release date, the Core Ultra 7 155H has been given a run of over 300 CPU benchmarks under Linux in a head-to-head with a Ryzen 7 7840U. This detailed testing was originally posted on Phoronix.com. The testing setup involved two laptops, with the 7840U powered by a Framework laptop while the 155H ran from an Acer Swift Go 14.

There are some core takeaways to glean from the hundreds of CPU benchmarks run. In its writeup, Phoronix provided a geometric mean of all test results done across both CPUs, which showed the AMD Ryzen 7840U enjoying a clean 28% lead in performance. 

It's important to note that these are purely CPU-bound benchmarks, so the powerful iGPUs present in both CPUs aren't actually being pitted against each other in these tests.

This doesn't necessarily mean that Ryzen 7 7840U enjoys an overall 28% performance lead in Linux. In fact, in the testing of both CPUs, the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H scored higher on 75 of 370 benchmarks. This means that while the 7840U is clearly the stronger overall performer for a Linux laptop, the Core Ultra 7 155H still managed to eke out a lead in specific workloads.

These results shouldn't necessarily be taken as a permanent indictment on Meteor Lake's Linux performance. With time, Intel may be able to improve Linux's Meteor Lake support in order to provide performance standings more in line with how the chips perform on Windows. 

On the Windows side, the Core Ultra 7 155H is supposedly significantly faster than the 7840U — but that's according to Intel's testing, which we haven't been able to verify with our benchmarking at Tom's Hardware just yet.

In any case, it seems like the clear winner for today between the Ryzen 7 7840U and Core 7 Ultra 155H is the 7480U — at least if you're using Linux.

Official details of the first of what will probably be a very long list of mini PCs built around Intel Meteor Lake laptop processors have been revealed. China’s Mechanical Revolution has unveiled its iMini Pro with Intel Core Ultra 5 125H (h/t ITHome). Moreover, the laptop-packing mini PC is already listed for pre-order on China’s JD.com for CNY4499, which is around $635, with availability starting from Jan 11, 2024.

The Intel Core Ultra 5 125H resides at the bottom of the new H series but is still probably a capable chip. It has a 14C / 18T CPU core configuration, specifically 4 Performance-cores, 7 Efficiency-cores, and 2 Low Power Efficiency-cores. A total of 18 MB of cache is present, and the max CPU clock speed you will see from this 65W turbo power part is 4.5 GHz.

Even though the Core Ultra 5 125H is at the lower end of the H series specs pile its GPU isn’t drastically cut. The top Core Ultras have 8 Xe cores running at up to 2.35 GHz, but this one has 7 Xe cores which peak at 2.2 GHz. Other standard features of the H series family present here include Intel's AI accelerating NPU, and support for up to 64 GB of RAM – DDR5-5600 or LPDDR5- 7467.

According to the linked sources, MechRevo’s iMini Pro offers 32 GB of DDR5 RAM and 1 TB of Gen4 NVMe SSD in its pre-order configuration. A spare M.2 storage slot is vacant for storage upgrades going forward.

For a small unit of roughly 6-inch square and 1.5-inch height (or precisely 154 x 152 x 37.8 mm), the MechRevo has a more than acceptable range of ports on offer. The front is pleasingly minimal, with just a circular LED inset power button. To the left is a pinhole reset, a USB-C port, 2x USB-A ports, and a Kensington lock. Round the back there is a DC barrel jack, a Thunderbolt 4 USB-C port, 3.5mm audio, DP, HDMI, two further USB-A ports, and twin 2.5 GbE LAN ports. Wireless connectivity is also provided, with Wi-Fi 6 supported by the hardware.

The above-outlined machine is probably a capable performer for general use and even some light gaming fun. It isn’t an ugly design, but MechRevo has made it VESA mountable so you can fix it securely and tidily on the back of a monitor.

In some preliminary testing, it is claimed the CPU in this mini PC stabilized at 88 degrees Celsius under a Cinebench R23 test loop. We’d also like to know about the fan noise from this device under load.

As we mentioned in the intro, this is one of the first mini PCs packing an Intel Core Ultra laptop processor that has been officially detailed. We have previously covered news of popular laptop lines from companies like Acer, MSI, Asus, Lenovo, and Samsung that have upgraded models ready for the new wave of AI PCs.

Portable device and notebook maker OneXPlayer has begun teasing a new tablet under its new OneXplorer series enabled with a Meteor Lake Ultra 7 CPU. The OneXPlayer X1 tablet has a 10.95-inch LTPS (Low-Temperature Polysilicon) 'gaming' LCD, providing a 120 Hz refresh rate and QHD resolution. According to a source, it uses a dual-channel LPDDR5X memory with an option to choose between 32GB and 64GB.

The tablet also has a 63 Gbps Oculink Port and a Windows face-recognition webcam, making it a versatile portable computing device. There's no other information about battery capacity or release date for this yet. It is recruiting BETA testers worldwide, so it is uncertain when they'll release this for retail.

It is speculated to use an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H or the Core Ultra 7 165H, as it advertises 'Next-Gen Arc high performance doubled core graphics' performance. Both these CPUs are sixteen-core/ 22-thread processors with six performance and eight efficiency cores, two low-power efficiency cores, and eight Intel Xe GPU cores.

About The Expected Meteor Lake CPUs

Intel showed off its Meteor Lake Ultra 7-165H's graphics performance against an AMD Ryzen 7 7840U with Radeon 780M on-chip graphics on a 16-inch laptop, showing a performance boost between 10% to 70% between sixteen games it is tested with. Intel graphics team has been pushing out drivers increasing its Xe and Arc graphics performance, so one could assume this improvement will also seen on these CPUs. Meteor-Lake is a low-powered, higher-performance chip; hence, you'll see much higher performance boosts with low power consumption by the device.

The OneXplorer X1 was designed by One-Network, which was founded in 2017 by a group of senior hardware engineers who worked for multiple companies. They have been making many handheld devices, tablets, and notebooks using Intel and AMD processors for a while. Therefore, I am curious why the OneXPlorer team has this Windows-based gaming tablet with no handheld gaming controls. Or maybe there is an add-on or a Bluetooth controller is provided? We'll have to wait and watch for now to see what information we get shortly.

Intel's Core Ultra chips (formerly Meteor Lake) launched on December 14th, and are already appearing in laptops you can buy. At Intel's official launch here in New York City, I sat down with Dan Rogers, the head of Intel's performance marketing lab in its Client Computing Group.

Rogers, the former product manager for Alder Lake and Raptor Lake, has a unique job as Intel pushes out its first chips based around AI: figuring out how to tell the story of what these can do, and also measuring their performance for Intel's marketing to the general public (Intel is in the PC business, after all).

Because right now, while Intel (and, let's be frank - AMD, Qualcomm, and Apple) have systems with neural processing units, or NPUs, lots of potential customers don't quite know what they could do with them, or why it would matter. I asked him about how people are supposed to know what an AI PC can do, when they can expect software that will affect their lives, and also learned more about how Intel is benchmarking AI applications internally.

Selling the AI PC

Intel's debut mobile processor with an on-board NPU is coming as the company is making a major brand name change. Intel Core i is old hat. Intel Core Ultra is your AI-equipped chip. Rogers suggested to me that the name change is part of the "multiple levels of education" that Intel will go through to inform customers about what they're getting.

"All of our processors code named 'Meteor Lake' will be Core Ultra and all Core Ultra processors will be Meteor Lake," Rogers said. "So, it's a fairly simple method of communicating to the end user, right, especially at the point of sale and retail and so forth that this is a PC that has built-in AI."

How people will actually use an NPU or other AI support, however, is a bit more nuanced. Rogers suggested to me that while AI has been foreign to a lot of people until now, he expects that won't be the case going forward as Zoom, Adobe, and other name-brand PC software start shipping features. After all, while you can download an OpenVINO plugin for GIMP or Audacity, but let's be real — most people won't do that.

"Definitely there are more open source community tech enthusiast-oriented usages for sure, early adopters and folks that want to really dig in," he said. "But, you know, also for just the general user, much of what they do today will now be made better through AI.

Otherwise, Rogers said that Intel is relying on three major points to convince people to make the leap. The first point, of course, is the NPU. The second is the GPU, which is seeing Arc-branded graphics for the first time. The third is battery life — Intel is promising a way more efficient machine, especially with certain tasks from the CPU and GPU offloaded to the NPU. (I'm very curious to test this.)

Is Intel still a CPU company in 2024?

So Intel has a three-pronged message: NPU, GPU, battery. Huh.

Perhaps I was being facetious, but I couldn't help but notice one thing as Intel introduced the new processors: a lack of emphasis on the CPUs. The CPU felt like it took a backseat. Is Intel, I asked, still a CPU company?

"[The CPU is] extremely important to us… We still believe we have a really strong position in the core technology, but absolutely, Meteor Lake kind of builds on what we were able to do with

the Core and performance hybrid architecture and Alder and Raptor for performance," Rogers said. "Now we have a third level of hybrid architecture for power efficiency, and then we're working on GPU and NPU as well.

"So, you know, as the kind of former Alder and Raptor guy, for me, it's a cool product because,

you know, it sort of compliments those advances that we had in the prior gen now working across all the other vectors of compute and efficiency."

For now, that's starting in Intel's mobile chips. It sure sounds like some of Meteor Lake's tech is coming to desktop soon, though. Rogers said that Intel will "share more later in the year" regarding moving the architecture into other computing segments.

The chicken and the egg

So you have an AI PC. Now what? 

That's the "chicken and the egg" problem of NPUs. They're out there, and now developers need to make software work with them.

I gave Rogers the case of my brother, who doesn't have a very complicated use case for work: he does emails; he does spreadsheets; he's got documents. He's still on Windows 10. Would he even notice?

"For sure, I would guess your brother is watching YouTube and Netflix," Rogers suggested. (He's right on YouTube. He doesn't have Netflix.) "Quite likely, he's making a family call or a business call with Zoom or Teams or WebEx, in these popular applications."

And these, Rogers tells me, are "much better" on Meteor Lake laptops. Video effects in Zoom, for instance, will be offloaded from the GPU to the NPU, helping to save power, leading to longer battery life. That, along with the "low-power island", including efficiency cores directly incorporated into the SoC tile, should save power.

"That-low power island is a really important technology for us, and we spent a ton of time in software tuning that to make that seamless, so that your brother doesn't necessarily need to know how all the bits are actually working there, but in the end, web browsing and video playback both locally streaming, just longer battery life, just better battery life, right? And that's all with similar performance to what we had in Raptor Lake."

What I got from this was that to start, the best AI features might not be ones you actually notice. Do you care if you know that your applications are using AI or an NPU as long as you're getting some sort of tangible benefit? Maybe not!

But Intel is promising that over 100 software companies are working with it to put out features that are optimized for the NPU. So when will we see those features come that really push people to new laptops with new CPUs?

Well, Intel has demos of Llama 2-based applications — I saw one at Intel's showcase — and Rogers expects to see LLMs as one major way app developers will use the NPU locally.

"My expectation is we're going to see not just one, but tens and hundreds of these from various ISVs, preloaded with various OEMs," he said. "And there's a ton of energy going on on this and people looking to run these both on the GPU and the NPU."

But Intel suggests it has another benefit on its side: scale. Rogers said that a "giant developer ramp" is required to get coders working on these types of projects, and that "in many cases, we have developers coming to us" for guidance with tools and frameworks.

How do you benchmark PCs on AI?

I test hardware for a living. So I had to ask, how did Intel decide how to test Meteor Lake on AI? The claims are bold, but there are only so many workloads to pick from right now.

"We're talking about the PC here right? So of course we want to benchmark it, right? That's just how we handle understanding PC technologies."

Rogers said his team went in looking to explain how the NPU compares to say, running a workload on the GPU. But it ends up that much of the benchmark, when it comes to AI applications, is really about something else: software.

"What we realized really quickly is we're not really benchmarking the hardware — we're actually benchmarking the code paths," he said. "We're benchmarking the software, which is really interesting, right? Like that's very different than what we see today in the CPU and the GPU."

That, Rogers said, is why Intel shared a chart showing that Meteor Lake runs all sorts of AI workloads, and does so "performantly." (AMD and Qualcomm's offerings were also listed, with lesser degrees of success.)

And benchmarking AI tools isn't cut and dry in other ways, Rogers said. "What's happening right now is okay, how big of a model can I run? And that's a question of computing power, how do I quantize that model, how do I minimize not just the compute but also the memory footprint and the memory bandwidth requirements which are enormous for many of these."

This isn't a hardware story, not entirely, Rogers said. You can come back to an improved model in weeks, he said, and see massive gains. This is also about software — or at least software optimization.

Goodbye, P-Series! Hello, H-Series?

Intel has simplified its naming scheme a bit with Meteor Lake, removing the "P series," which has only been around for a couple of generations, and wrapping that into the long-existing H-series. Now, there's just H and U.

H series is the larger chip, with a 6+8 die (6 P-cores, 8 E-cores, though there are processors with 4 P-cores), while the U series is designed for 2+8. 

Perhaps the biggest difference is that the H series is running at 28W, which the P series ran at. On Raptor Lake, the H chips ran at 45W. When the Intel Core Ultra 9 185H launches in early 2024, that will be a 45W part. So Intel still has a range of TDPs. It's simpler in naming, but not inherently in power.

"In [the] Meteor Lake generation it will be largely what was our P series, so that thin and light performance — thin and light concept — packing a lot of power into an integrated graphics system," Rogers said.

But that means that people could, in theory, go into a store and think they're getting a different amount of power. How, I asked, will Intel make it clear what you're getting?

"Part of improving communication is simplifying, so we definitely got the feedback and we wanted to just simplify the number of choices," he said. So that's why we made it from a three-letter structure to a two-letter structure which we think is helpful."

Rogers said that the decision will really be made when a customer goes to a store and looks for what they want to buy. That messaging, he said, will come from the company that makes the laptop and what they offer in their lineup.

"And then as a user, you're just able to kind of see, 'OK, what are my needs,' right? Do I want lighter, do I want a little bit more performance? So we have a letter that gives that choice, but really that's a choice that you're going to see in the exact laptops that you're interested in purchasing. So if you know that you're looking for a more powerful [PC], lots of those laptops generally will have H-series."

9W parts and "very different" form factors

Intel didn't have a low-wattage part available in 13th Gen mobile, which led to 12th Gen chips in foldables released this year. In Intel's list of chips coming in Q1 of 2024, there's the Core Ultra 7 164U and Core Ultra 5 134U, both of which are 9W processors. So what new form factors could Intel be trying to enable by going back to low-power parts?

"Without pre-announcing from my friends, colleagues, and partners I think you will see some, notable, very different form factors for Core Ultra, not necessarily in the PC space," Rogers said, pausing.

"It's a PC, but in a different category, let's say," he resumed to finish his thought. I couldn't help but think that every major gaming handheld so far has used AMD Ryzen processors. There's also Lenovo's rollable prototype from Mobile World Congress. At the very least, we could get more modern foldables.

But most Meteor Lake designs will be two-in-ones, clamshells, and other more traditional shapes, he said. "Most of the focus of our partners is actually driving more compute into thinner, lighter envelopes. Thermal technologies have gotten a lot better." Rogers suggested that the increased thermal capacity means you can put a 28W part in a system you used to put a 15W CPU into.

And because AI can be computationally demanding, Rogers predicted that you'll see more computers with the higher TDP choice (the 28W H-series) rather than the lower-power 15W U-series chips, though both will be available.

"At the end of the day, OEMs make the right decision based on their form factor, but we'd like to provide choice," he said. "And I think the biggest thing that I'm most excited about in Core Ultra, for me, is the battery life improvements." All of the data Intel showed at launch, he pointed out, was on the 28W part.

We'll see what Intel and laptop companies come up with over the next year. While a handful of devices from MSI, Lenovo, Dell, HP, Asus, Acer, Samsung, Gigabyte, and more launched this week, CES 2024 is right around the corner. And what would a new year be without a slew of new laptops? We'll see then.

Samsung has updated its Galaxy Book series laptops with Intel’s freshly launched Meteor Lake processors. The new Galaxy Book 4 series includes portables divided into Ultra, Pro, and Pro 360 families. Common features among the series (other than the new Intel CPUs) include AMOLED screens, Samsung Knox security chips, dual mics, AKG Quad speakers, 1080p webcams, backlit keyboards, ultra-portable designs, and up to RTX 4070 laptop graphics with the Galaxy Book 4 Ultra.

In its news release heralding the Galaxy Book 4 series of laptops, Samsung repeated the mantra about Meteor Lake PCs representing “a new era of AI PCs,” with the support of Intel’s industry-first AI PC Acceleration program and 100s of software vendors. Samsung also mentioned that it has a significant Galaxy ecosystem that should give it an advantage in intelligent and connected experiences across PCs, phones, tablets, and other devices. For example, there is Samsung Studio, a new video creation tool available across Galaxy devices, Galaxy Second Screen, plus Photo Remaster software with AI image processing.

Though all the new Meteor Lake-powered Galaxy Book 4 series include Intel's first integrated neural processing unit (NPU), Samsung pointed out that its top-of-the-range Galaxy Book 4 Ultra "takes the user experience to the next level" with Nvidia GeForce RTX 40 laptop graphics. The other machines use MTL's integrated Arc graphics.

Samsung says that the family uses a Dynamic AMOLED 2X display with excellent contrast and colors, plus an outdoor vision booster. All models are also equipped with touch screens and anti-reflective technology.

Samsung is keen to offer a well-rounded audio-visual experience, as it does with its Galaxy smart devices. Thus, the impressive visuals are partnered with AKG Quad speakers (Woofer max 5Wx2, Tweeter 2Wx2) with Dolby Atmos, “studio-quality dual microphones” with bi-directional AI noise canceling, and the standard 2MP webcam.

Another highlight we would like to draw your attention to is the modern port selection. All the devices come with a pair of Thunderbolt 4 ports, a USB Type-A port, an HDMI 2.1 port (supports 8K@60, 5K@120), Micro SD, and a headphone/microphone jack.

Above is a gallery showing the spec sheets for the Galaxy Book 4 Ultra (16-inch), Book 4 Pro (14-inch and 16-inch), and Book 4 Pro 360 (16-inch). Check through these if you are interested in the finer details of any particular model.

Samsung says that the Galaxy Book 4 series will become available in January in Korea, and then roll out to other select markets. Color choices will include Moonstone Gray and Platinum Silver. However, we don’t have any pricing details to share today.

Intel launched its Meteor Lake CPUs for laptops today, and along with the various models, it provided some in-house benchmarks of both the CPU and GPU. We're still waiting for our first laptop reviews using the new chips, but this marks a pretty substantial step forward for what we can expect from Intel integrated graphics, as it will have Arc-branded GPUs on the top H-series parts.

Intel provided many details about the Meteor Lake graphics tile architecture back in September, but at the time it didn't provide any concrete examples of what we can expect in terms of real-world gaming performance other than a nebulous claim of "double" the performance. With today's launch, that changes, and while independent benchmarks will have to wait a bit longer, we can at least start with the Intel number — sprinkled with salt, as usual for any manufacturer-provided tests.

Previously, Intel made claims about potentially doubling the integrated graphics performance. Now, even by its own data, tested at 1080p and medium settings across a suite of 16 games, that appears to be more of an "at most" figure rather than something we're likely to see in a lot of games.

The test suite consists of a collection of relatively demanding as well as lighter games. Apex Legends, GTAV, DOTA2, Team Fortress 2, League of Legends, Counter-Strike 2, and World of Warcraft all trend toward the lighter side of the spectrum, particularly when using "medium" settings. But Borderlands 3, Resident Evil Village, Far Cry 6, and PUBG are all at least reasonably taxing.

Of course, Intel didn't provide actual FPS values for these benchmarks, instead showing percent improvement of a Core Ultra 7 165H compared to the previous generation Core i7-1370P, so it's a bit difficult to say precisely how well the Arc GPU was able to run the various games — is it doubling performance from 20 to 40 FPS, or doubling from 40 to 80 FPS? That would depend on the game and other factors, but we don't have the raw numbers.

Update: Intel also provided the above benchmark chart, comparing its Meteor Lake integrated Arc GPU in a Core Ultra 7 165H with AMD's Radeon 780M running in a Ryzen 7 7840U laptop. These are both 16-inch class laptops, running 28W TDP processors, so it's at least reasonably like-for-like comparisons.

Intel ran 33 gaming benchmarks on the two laptops, and showed an average performance advantage of 10% with the integrated Arc GPU. It's not a universal win for Intel, which is realistic — we'd be far more suspicious if every test showed Arc in the lead.

AMD garnered modest 10–18 percent wins in Death Stranding, PUBG, Counter-Strike 2, and Apex Legends. Meanwhile, Intel Arc came out with larger leads of 10% to as much as 70% in sixteen of the tested games — with Dying Light 2, Final Fantasy XIV, For the King, League of Legends, and Dota 2 all showing leads of 30% or more. The remaining games fall in the -5% to +8% range, which is close enough to basically categorize them all as being a tie.

Based on the broad selection of games, it looks like a reasonable statement that Intel's integrated Arc GPU will be able to compete with AMD's currently fastest integrated Radeon 780M. Neither one will be great for high-end gaming, but both should be able to do reasonably well at 1080p medium settings.

Intel also talked up its XeSS upscaling algorithm again, which runs in DP4a mode on the integrated Arc GPUs. This is in contrast to the desktop Arc graphics cards, which all have XMX (Xe Matrix eXtensions) support and uses different code. In the past, XeSS running on XMX looked clearly superior to the DP4a mode, but Intel worked on improving the DP4a quality since XeSS first launched, and it should be more comparable to FSR2 and even DLSS2 upscaling quality now.

Note also that there are two DP4a options for XeSS. One is tuned to run optimally on Intel's enhanced DP4a engines and provides better performance on Intel GPUs. The other is a general DP4a implementation that runs on non-Intel GPUs. The quality of the two DP4a code paths should be the same, so it's only the performance that would potentially differ. Considering most games that support XeSS also support either DLSS, FSR2, or both, it's not a particularly critical factor.

Anyway, looking at the performance, Intel shows an average improvement of 39% across the 15 games tested, at 1080p. It's unclear if this is using different upscaling factors or settings, depending on the game, but normally we'd only recommend using Quality (or even Ultra Quality) mode upscaling at 1080p.

Intel does provide exact figures for the improvements measured, which range from 11% in Chivalry 2 to as much as 129% in Like a Dragon Gaiden — and yes, that's very much an outlier and we wouldn't normally expect XeSS or any other upscaling algorithm to double performance with 2X Quality upscaling. Witcher 3 also shows a near doubling of performance from XeSS (93%), while most of the other games fall in the 30~40 percent improvement range.

We've gone into more detail on the various Meteor Like CPU models elsewhere, but we also wanted to quickly note the differences in the various SKUs on the GPU side of the equation. There are two Meteor Lake processor variants right now, a "large" chip used in the H-series, and a "small" chip used in the U-series parts.

Two major differences between the chips are on the Compute Tile (CPU P-cores and E-cores, cache, and other elements), and on the GPU Tile (GPU Xe-Cores and a few other related bits). The Compute Tile is manufactured using Intel's own Intel 4 process node, and comes with up to six P-cores and eight E-cores on the larger chip, or two P-cores and eight E-cores on the smaller chip.

The GPU Tile is manufactured using TSMC's N5 process node, which represents a step up from the N6 node used on the desktop Arc GPUs. There are two variants again, with up to eight Xe-cores on the larger H-series chips, and up to four Xe-cores on the smaller U-series parts. The H-series also clocks the GPU at up to 2.35 GHz, while the U-series tops out at 2.0 GHz — and power limits could mean lower clocks in normal use.

Architecturally, the two GPU variants are the same, with the only real difference being the number of Xe-cores and the boost clock. However, in order to avoid diluting the Arc brand, only Meteor Lake chips with the larger GPU Tile will use the Arc name — the others will use Intel Graphics branding.

It's also interesting to note that the GPU Tile is almost purely focused on GPU compute, as most of the other graphics-related functionality is located on other tiles (the IO Tile and SoC Tile, to be specific). Intel didn't provide details on the tile sizes, but we'd guess the larger chip will be close to twice as large as the smaller chip.

Wrapping things up, Intel also provided some like-for-like comparisons of its new Core Ultra 7 165H's graphics performance against AMD's Ryzen 7 7840U. That might seem unfair, pitting an H-series part against a U-series competitor part, though both chips have a base 28W TDP rating. That doesn't mean both chips are using the same amount of power when playing games, however, and that's something we'll need to dig into more when we get actual laptops for testing.

Going with the provided data, Intel showed up to 5% higher performance than AMD's Radeon 780M when looking at the 16-inch laptops, with the 14-inch Intel laptop matching the performance of the 16-inch AMD laptop. The example 14-inch AMD laptop meanwhile dropped 11% in performance, presumably due to thermal limits and power restrictions associated with the more compact form factor.

There are some refreshed AMD "Hawk Point" processors coming out soon, but to all appearances those are effectively renamed variants of the existing "Phoenix Point" chips. We'll need to wait for the future "Strix Point" processors before AMD makes more significant upgrades, though even then it may be more AI and NPU updates rather than substantial GPU improvements.

Laptop vendors should already have Meteor Lake based models available for order, though many more models and brands should appear in the coming months. As these are mobile-focused chips, we also know that performance and other features can vary quite a bit, based on the particulars of design. We anticipate seeing a lot of new laptops, using both AMD and Intel processors, in the coming months, and likely many will be shown off at CES in January. Once we have those in hand, we'll be able to better quantify how Intel's integrated Arc GPU stacks up to the competition.

The full slide deck (at least, the portions related to the integrated Arc GPUs) is available below for reference, including additional details about Intel's testing.

Today is the big day for Intel's Core Ultra launch, and Asus is right on cue with its new ZenBook 14 OLED laptop featuring the new "Meteor Lake" processors. Asus is debuting an all-new design with its ZenBook 14 OLED (UX3405), complete with a 2.82-pound all-metal chassis that is now 5 percent more compact than its predecessor.

At its heart is up to a Core Ultra 7 155H processor supporting up to 32GB of LPDDR5x-7467 memory, Intel Arc integrated graphics, and a 1TB PCIe 4.0 SSD (base systems come with a Core Ultra 5-125H, 8GB of memory, and a 512GB SSD). However, the big thing to look out for will be Intel’s dedicated neural processing unit (NPU) on the new Core Ultra chips, which is designed for running sustained artificial intelligence (AI) interference workloads. It will be interesting to see the performance benefits of this hardware as more developers embrace it. And that’s in addition to all the usual generational improvements we expect for performance and efficiency.

As its name implies, the ZenBook 14 OLED features a 14-inch OLED panel. Base systems have a full HD resolution, while a 2880 x 1800, 16:10 panel is available as an option. It sports a 120 Hz refresh rate, Asus’s thin “NanoEdge” bezels, 100 percent DCI-P3 coverage, and a maximum brightness rating of 600 nits (DisplayHDR 600 True Black compliant).

Despite a frame that measures just 14.9 mm thick, Asus includes two Thunderbolt 4 ports, an HDMI 2.1 port, a single USB 3.2 Gen 1 (Type-A) port, and a combo audio jack. Asus supports Bluetooth 5.3 and Wi-Fi 6E on the ZenBook 14 OLED, but remember that 2024 will likely be the year of Wi-Fi 7. Also of note is a 75 WHr lithium-polymer battery, which Asus says is good for over 15 hours of endurance. When it comes time to recharge that battery, you’ll use one of the Thunderbolt 4 ports (65-watt fast charging supported with the included USB-C adapter).

Other notable features include a 1080p “AiSense” webcam with 3D noise reduction technology, Asus NumberPad 2.0 integrated into the touchpad, and Harman Kardon-tuned speakers with Dolby Atmos support.

According to Asus, the ZenBook 14 OLED (UX3405) will launch in early 2024 from $1,299. It will be available directly from the Asus eShop and at Best Buy.

MSI is among the first to announce a new laptop with Intel's Core Ultra (codename "Meteor Lake") processors. Intel is really pushing its neural processing units for AI, and MSI is going so far with it as to name its flagship laptops after the fledgling technology.

The Prestige 16 AI Evo, Prestige 16 AI Studio Evo, and Prestige 13 AI Evo are the first laptops we're seeing with the Core Ultra chips. Those new processors are built on the Intel 4 process node and should offer about 10% performance improvement over Raptor Lake-H.

All three of the devices are using the Intel Core Ultra 7 H-series chips. The 13-inch laptop will use the Core Ultra 5 125H or Ultra 7 155H, while the 16-inchers will use the Ultra 7 155H and Ultra 9 185H. All of them will include a dedicated NPU, for sustained AI performance and offloading AI use cases from the GPU. The chips all come with a next-gen Intel Arc integrated GPU for graphics.

The MSI Prestige 16 AI Evo and 13 AI Evo will use that new Arc iGPU for video as well, while the Prestige 16 AI Studio Evo will rely on the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 or RTX 4070.

In our brief hands-on time with the AI laptops, which were largely basic production samples that I couldn't test with actual AI functionality, I was most surprised by how light the 16-inch models felt in my hands. MSI suggests it's their special magnesium-aluminum chassis that keeps the base version down to 3.3 pounds (1.5 kg)

Both versions of the 16-inch Prestige will have a 99.9 WHr battery, but while the regular models with Arc graphics will have a 100W power adapter, the Studio version will have a heftier 140W adapter that can also handle the discrete GPU. MSI has suggested you can get up to 14 hours on a charge, but we'll have to see how that goes in our testing.

The 16-incher has plenty of ports, largely along the back: an HDMI 2.1 port, USB Type-A 3.2 Gen 2, and two USB Type-C ports. On the Prestige 16 AI Evo, they're both Thunderbolt 4; on the AI Studio Evo, one is Thunderbolt 4, and the other is USB Type-C 3.2. Additionally, you get an Ethernet jack, a full-sized SD card slot, a lock slot, and a 3.5 mm headphone jack.

There are two screen options: a 2560 x 1600 standard screen, or a 3840 x 2400 OLED panel. RAM, which is soldered,  comes in at 16GB or 32GB on the regular Prestige 16 AI Evo, and only comes in the larger capacity on the Studio.

Meanwhile, the 13-inch AI Evo has a smaller footprint and weighs just 2.1 pounds. The ports on this smaller model are on the sides: a micro SD card slot, lock slot, USB-A 3.2 Gen 2, HDMI 2.1, a pair of Thunderbolt 4 ports, and a headphone jack. In the US, all of the 13-inch models will come with a 2880 x 1800 OLED panel, though MSI's specs suggest a 1920 x 1200 non-OLED option may be available in some markets.   

All three of the laptops include proximity sensors, 3D noise reduction cameras, and a spatial array microphone, some of which may be used for AI meeting features, but also for existing features like detecting when someone walks away from their laptop.

Beyond the hardware, MSI plans on putting its own AI software on these three laptops. This will include AI noise cancellation software and the MSI AI Engine, which promises to sense what you're doing on the device (for instance, gaming, working, meeting, streaming shows) and adjust system settings accordingly. (Funnily enough, the AI Engine software doesn't actually utilize the NPU, but instead has the most common apps pre-sorted into categories.) Those include toggling performance, audio and visual settings, and more.

Lastly, there's an "AI artist," an image generator along the lines of DALL-E. It remains to be seen if this tool will be able to compete with existing cloud-based offerings.

All three of the laptops are set to launch this month, though possibly in limited quantities. The 13-inch Prestige will start at $1,049, with the Prestige 16 AI Evo and Prestige 16 AI Studio Evo beginning at $1,399 and $1,899, respectively.

In sync with Intel's Meteor Lake launch, Acer has two new laptops lines ready for use with the new processor. There's an ultraportable, the Acer Swift Go 14, and a new gaming laptop, the Acer Predator Triton Neo 16.

The Predator Triton Neo 16 will launch in March 2024 starting at $1,499.99 and €1,799.99. That device is planned to go up to an Intel Core Ultra 9 185H processor (there are no HX chips in the Core Ultra lineup) paired with Nvidia graphics, up to an RTX 4070. Ports include HDMI, two Thunderbolt 4 ports and a micro SD card reader. The 16-inch screen will be either a basic 1920 x 1200 panel or a 3200 x 2000, 165 Hz high refresh option. For those who love RGB, the keyboard has three-zone lighting.

Designed to compete with the best gaming laptops, the Triton appears fairly sleek and minimalist as far as gaming machines go, with an all-silver design that wouldn't look out of place in an airport or a cafe.

Meanwhile, the Acer Swift Go 14, which hopes to find a place among the best Ultrabooks, will launch as soon as this month in certain regions (starting at €1,199), but will come in January in North America, beginning at $799.99. The Swift Go will utilize only the Core Ultra 5 125H or Ultra 7 155H, and will use integrated graphics cards, either Intel Arc Graphics or Intel Graphics (this is based largely on whether or not the laptop includes 16GB of RAM in dual-channel).

The display options for the Swift include a 14-inch, 22880 x 1880 90Hz with DisplayHDR True Black 500, or a lower resolution 1920 x 1200 touch screen at 60 Hz. The machine also features a pair of USB Type-C ports over Thunderbolt 4, two USB Type-A ports, HDMI 2.1, a headphone jack, and a microSD card reader, as well as a 1440p webcam.

Acer says it will be using some new AI features in its software. PurifiedVoice removes background noise, while Purified View can touch up your onscreen appearance, including background blur and gaze correction. (These types of features already exist, but now some of them will take advantage of the Intel Core Ultra NPU). The AcerSense utility  now includes an "AI Zone" tab to point you to different AI features, so in theory we'll see more coming later on.

With the launch of Intel's new Core Ultra processors (codenamed Meteor Lake), OEMs are announcing a slew of laptops powered by the AI-friendly chips. Lenovo's flagship productivity laptops -- the ThinkPad X1 Carbon and X1 2-in-1 (formerly X1 Yoga) -- are getting refreshed with Meteor Lake CPUs, and the chassis design is changing to give both models smaller footprints and a little less weight.

I had a chance to see both new ThinkPads at a Lenovo briefing last week and, as someone who owns an 8th Gen X1 Carbon and has used all the recent models, I was immediately struck by the X1 Carbon (Gen 12)'s smaller dimensions. The 14-inch screen, still a 16:10 aspect panel, looks like it is closer to the deck and the palm rest seems ever-so-slightly shorter. 

Above the screen sits a metal protrusion with the webcam / IR camera which Lenovo calls the "communication" bar; this feature debuted on 2023's ThinkPad Z series laptops, and you can use it as a grip to lift the lid when the system is closed. The power button is now located on the right side of the laptop -- a benefit for those who want to turn on the system while its lid is closed.

According to the spec sheets, the new generation's chassis measures 12.31 x 8.45 x 0.59 inches (312.8 x 214.75 x 14.96mm) versus the Gen 11's size of 12.43 x 8.76 x 0.60 inches (315.6 x 222.5 x 15.36 mm). That's 0.13 inches less width, and 0.29 inches shorter depth to go with a very modest z-height reduction of 0.01 inches. The good news is that there's till room for two USB Type-A ports, an HDMI out  port and a 3.5mm audio jack. 

ThinkPad X1 Carbon (Gen 12) / X1 2-in-1 (Gen 9) Specs

I was concerned that the shorter deck would cause my wrists to dangle off the edge while typing, but I had a chance to spend a couple of minutes with a sample X1 Carbon and there was still plenty of room for my hands on that palm rest. To my disappointment, the carbon fiber material on the X1 Carbon (Gen 12) isn't soft-touch or rubbery, which I find comfy, but is plain matte black. Lenovo told us that it's going with a matte material to avoid fingerprint stains. 

On the bright side, the keys have the same excellent smile-shaped curves, deep travel and snappy feedback that we've come to expect from a ThinkPad. Lenovo has made a small change by adding small tactile bumps to a few keys -- volume up / down, insert, Fn and Enter, to help visually impaired users locate them more easily. I can see this also helping touch typists like me who dislike looking down at the keyboard.

In a major improvement, the new X1 Carbon and X1 2-in-1 will pull up a quick menu when you double-tap on the TrackPoint. A Lenovo rep said that future software improvements could allow you to assign more custom features to the TrackPoint tapping. For those who don't like the little red nub (and why wouldn't you?) there's a generously-sized glass touchpad. You can also opt for a haptic touchpad, but that means you won't have dedicated buttons for the TrackPoint (you'd have to tap the top of the haptic pad to click with TrackPoint). 

On the X1 2-in-1, the stylus is now larger and attaches magnetically to either the lid or the side. The prior-gen models had small styli that went into a tiny "garage" on the right side.

The screen on both X1 laptops is the same 14-inch, 16:10 size we're used to and the base resolution for both will remain as 1920 x 1200. And the top option will remain a 2.8K OLED panel, but the high-end panel will also have a 120 Hz refresh rate, the first time a ThinkPad X1 Carbon has had a high-refresh-rate display. The camera that sits above the screen is going to a higher resolution, with the ability to capture images at up to 8 megapixels (that's 4K, versus 1080p on the prior gen).

On the inside, the layout of the X1 Carbon has been redesigned to provide better cooling as, instead of having two fans right next to each other and blowing all the hot air out of one spot, the fans are spread out.

The RAM options stay pretty much the same as the last generation, with 16, 32 and 64GB DDR5 options running at up to 6400 MHz. The SSD remains a PCIe Gen 4 NVMe drive with capacities of up to 2TB. And the battery is the same 57 Whr unit.

However, there's good news for fans of high-speed Wi-Fi, as the X1 Carbon will come up "up to Wi-Fi 7." It's not clear from the press materials we got whether Wi-Fi 7 support will be standard on the base model or an upgrade option.

Intel Meteor Lake Means Local AI

The real star of the show, spec-wise, is the new Meteor Lake processor, which will be available in a variety of SKUs ranging from U5 to U7 (what would have been known as Core i5 or Core i7). All models will have a neural processing unit (NPU), a first for Intel.

The NPU is designed to make running local AI applications feasible where today such workloads really need a discrete GPU. So you should be able to do things like creating images with Stable Diffusion, transcribing text to speech, or analyzing all of your activities with something like Rewind.Ai.

Many AI tasks like these currently run in the cloud, but using cloud services sometimes costs money (and could cost more in the future), requires Internet and shares your data with a third party who could use it in ways you wouldn't like. Today, when you want to ask Microsoft Copilot or ChatGPT to do something, they must send your request to a company's servers. Soon, many more AI tasks could be handled locally.

What remains to be seen is how quickly and well software makers will optimize their AI apps for Meteor Lake's NPU. You can get really strong AI performance today if you use a discrete Nvidia graphics card with lots of VRAM, because apps are optimized specifically for CUDA. Will these same apps be made to work as well with an Intel NPU and will the NPU be able to offer inference performance anywhere near what a discrete graphics card does? We'll have to see.

Lenovo's ThinkPad X1 Carbon (Gen 12) is set to start shipping this month in limited configurations (with non-vPro CPUs), for a starting price of $2,989. More configurations with vPro CPUs will come next year. The ThinkPad X1 2-in-1 will start shipping in March 2024 with a starting price of $2,639.

A Weibo user has leaked images and system specifications of Samsung's upcoming Galaxy Book 4, which uses Intel's Core Ultra 9 185H Meteor Lake CPU (via @9550pro on X). The leak includes clear images of the internal layout of the Galaxy Book 4 (presumably the Ultra model) and screenshots from CPU-Z.

Unfortunately, we didn't get much benchmarking data from this leak since the leaker was, in their own words, "too lazy to run" benchmarks. They did share a CPU-Z benchmark result, and the performance is roughly on par with AMD's Ryzen 7 7700X. However, CPU-Z's built-in test isn't known for being great, so drawing early conclusions based on this single data point is probably not a good idea.

Although the Weibo user didn't specify what laptop he was showing off, it's all but sure the laptop is Samsung's Galaxy Book 4, which is rumored to be announced on December 15. The internal layout of the leaked laptop is highly similar to that of the Galaxy Book 3 Ultra, which has the same color scheme on the PCB, the exact placement of M.2 slots and USB ports, and even near-identical cable routing.

According to the leak, this Galaxy Book 4 is equipped with the Core Ultra 9 185H and Nvidia's RTX 4070, paired with an improved vapor chamber cooler. The laptop also has Power Delivery 3.1 charging and uses a 140-watt charger. We can also guess the computer has the same ports as the Galaxy Book 3 Ultra: HDMI, Micro SD, 3.5mm audio, a single USB Type-A port, and two Thunderbolt 4 ports.

The CPU-Z screenshot reveals that the Core Ultra 9 185H has a 45-watt TDP, which is standard for  Intel's H-class chips. We also see that the CPU uses the C0 stepping, which indicates what version of Meteor Lake the chip operates. Steppings are organized by letter (a distinct version) and divided by number. If you're familiar with software updates for games or GPU drivers, C0 means version 3.0.

A stepping of C0 implies a somewhat longer development process than usual. For comparison, Ryzen 7000 Raphael chips use the B2 stepping, Ryzen 5000 Vermeer CPUs initially used the B0 stepping but later moved to B2, and Intel's Raptor Lake processors are all on B0. Alder Lake CPUs had a stepping of C0, much like Meteor Lake, and there are parallels between the two chips. Alder Lake was developed on the troubled Intel 7 (formerly 10nm) node, and Meteor Lake is the first CPU to use the Intel 4 (previously 7nm) node, which also saw its development issues.

Intel will announce Meteor Lake on December 14, so corresponding laptops should be around the corner.

Samsung's Galaxy Book 4 will use Intel Meteor Lake CPUs and will be announced on the 15th of December, according to a report from Yonhap News. That's just a day after Meteor Lake's December 14 launch date. Samsung's apparent enthusiasm for Meteor Lake is thought to be down to its AI hardware, which the company plans to utilize through its 'Samsung Gauss' large language model (LLM).

The Korean language source report confirms that the Galaxy Book 4 will use Intel Core Ultra processors, which are the higher-end Meteor Lake CPUs set to largely replace the Core i5, i7, and i9. Current generation Galaxy Book 3 devices have up to a Core i7, so we might be able to expect Samsung to mostly rely on Core Ultra 7 chips like the Core Ultra 7 155H. The Galaxy Book 3 Ultra offers a Core i9 though, so perhaps Samsung will even make use of the Core Ultra 9 185H or some other chip.

Although Samsung's announcement is reportedly on the 15th, the actual release date of the Galaxy Book 4 is not thought to be firm yet. It's either going to launch at the end of the month or early in January; given that CES is in the first week of January, it's possible that at the latest we'll see Samsung launch the Galaxy Book 4 then.

Samsung's enthusiasm for Meteor Lake is seemingly due to the chip's AI capabilities. Its SoC tile contains a neural processing unit (or NPU), which can be used to accelerate the performance of the Samsung Gauss large language model. Gauss was announced last month, and it's expected to make an appearance in the company's Galaxy S24 smartphone early next year. However, the Galaxy Book 4 might be the company's first device to feature Gauss.

Yonhap reports that LG and HP are also working on Meteor Lake laptops, which isn't a surprise, but they are "weighing the timing." Presumably, that means they may not be as quick to market as Samsung, and may only announce or launch their own devices in 2024. That might check out, as there have been leaks for Dell, Asus, and Acer laptops using Meteor Lake chips, but none so far for HP and LG.

The Windows Report claims to have leaked every product that Dell is set to unveil at CES this upcoming January, including Alienware gaming laptops equipped with Meteor Lake CPUs. Dell's choice to use Intel's next generation CPU is a vote of confidence for its gaming performance, though Meteor Lake won't be powering every upcoming Alienware laptop according to the leak.

Core Ultra H CPUs, such as the Core Ultra 7 155H and Core Ultra 9 185H, will feature in the m16 R2 and the x16 R2. The Windows Report didn't specify which exact CPUs would be present in the laptops, though we can expect at minimum Core Ultra 5 chips (equivalent to Core i5s) as that's the branding's lowest tier. Of course, Dell wouldn't likely replace the Core i7s and Core i9s in the current m16 and x16 with i5 equivalents, so we can probably expect the company to use Core Ultra 7 and 9 CPUs.

However, the top-end m18 R2 will not use Meteor Lake but instead a 14th Gen CPU, presumably a Core i9. The leak doesn't explain why Raptor Lake Refresh got the job instead of Meteor Lake, but it's probably because Raptor Lake chips outperform Meteor Lake at a higher power draw, which this laptop is likely to have. That's also probably one of the reasons why Meteor Lake isn't coming to mainstream desktop PCs either.

These upcoming Alienware laptops will also stick with Nvidia RTX 40 series GPUs as current models have. The m16 R2 is also noted as getting a chassis and cooler redesign; the Windows Report doesn't say one way or another whether the x16 R2 and m18 R2 are getting a new design too. One new feature that all these laptops get is Stealth Mode, which is supposed to disable all the Alienware gamer features, making a user's laptop more suitable for professional environments.

Meteor Lake is also making its way to the XPS line-up, though we already got a hint of that with a leaked Core Ultra 7 155H benchmark that was apparently run on the XPS 13. The report doesn't mention any 14th Gen CPUs being used for the next generation of XPS laptops, so presumably they all use Meteor Lake. That's another indication that Meteor Lake is great at lower power, but doesn't scale particularly well with more watts.