We have been waiting for a long time for Intel to officially launch its next PC CPU architecture, with the code name Meteor Lake. Today at Computex, Intel showed off a prototype Meteor Lake chip to members of the media.
Wccftech reports that Intel showed off the integrated VPU on Meteor Lake, which is supposed to help with AI apps and their features. One of the demos showed that the included VPU made using Advanced Blue processing better than a chip without the VPU, and it also used a fifth of the power consumption.
Another Meteor Lake VPU demo used the Stable Diffusion AI text-to-image program. Again using it with the VPU resulted in faster processing of the artwork compared to using it without the VPU.
The chip that was used in the Computex demo has 16 cores and 22 threads. However, it has not been confirmed that this will be the case when the first Meteor Lake chips start shipping. That is supposed to happen sometime later this summer, according to Intel, with more info to be released sometime in August or September. That would appear to be on track with Intel"s previous release time frames for Meteor Lake, which were targeting the second half of 2023.
Intel also talked about the embedded GPU inside the Meteor Lake chip, It will be a version of Intel"s Arc graphics chip and is supposed to support features like DX12 Ultimate, ray tracing, and XeSS. However, we don"t have any information yet on the performance of this integrated GPU so even if it does support ray tracing, it may not be able to compete with discrete GPUs in that area.
Finally, Intel stated that we should learn more about the company"s plans to rebrand its future CPUs sometime in early June. Several weeks ago, Intel confirmed it would be making "brand changes" for its future chips, which means we will likely be saying "Goodbye" to the current Core brand.