The new Arrow Lake architecture from Intel, also known as the Core Ultra 200S series, provides artificial intelligence capabilities on Intel desktop computers. However, the chip does not use Copilot+ capabilities for the mobile Lunar Lake chip from Intel – instead, it uses an older NPU module found in Meteor Lake.
Currently, this means that if you purchase an Arrow Lake chip, you won’t be able to utilize some of the new artificial intelligence enhancements present in the 2024 Windows 11 update, such as generative AI and the controversial summoning feature. The enhanced NPU 3 unit in Arrow Lake provides only 13 TOPS, while Microsoft has set 40 TOPS as the bar for Copilot+. Intel plans to ship more than 40 million AI-enabled PCs in 2024, using the vague term “AI-enabled PC” that accompanied the launch of Meteor Lake.
Arrow Lake is not the first desktop computer architecture to include an NPU for artificial intelligence. In January, AMD announced the Ryzen 8000 desktop processor series with an NPU capable of 39 TOPS. However, the Ryzen 8000 was quickly replaced or missed with the Ryzen 9000 processor after six months in June – without an NPU, as a prelude to the introduction of Zen 5 with a strong 16% performance improvement compared to the previous generation. Neither Ryzen 8000 nor Arrow Lake meet the minimum requirements to be labeled as a Copilot+ PC.
Arrow Lake, like Meteor Lake, is a separate architecture – a fancy term for standard design. In theory, couldn’t Intel manufacture more than the 45 TOPS NPU 4 found inside Lunar Lake and add it to the Arrow Lake package? Yes…and no, say Intel executives.
Update: Intel’s Arrow Lake processors are now released. How do claims of efficiency and performance stack up? Find out in the tested Core Ultra 9 285K: 10 facts to know about Intel’s brand new CPUs. Gordon Mah Ung also delves deeper into the 285K’s performance in productivity workloads in the detailed video below:
Keeping It Simple
First, the NPU unit for Arrow Lake is the same as the NPU 3 for Meteor Lake, as stated by Robert Hallock, Intel’s VP and General Manager of AI for Clients and Technical Marketing, to journalists.
He said: “So, we had a lot of time to learn and optimize that, and it made sense for us to shoehorn that in.” (The NPU unit for Meteor Lake birthed 11.5 TOPS, while the enhanced version for Arrow Lake produced 13 TOPS.)
However, Intel’s enthusiastic customer base also pointed out that they didn’t want to sacrifice certain features, like a powerful GPU, to tick the AI box. Intel, under pressure to deliver Arrow Lake on time, found it easier to just use the solid design.
Hallock continued: “We’ve had a very long conversation internally about how to allocate the transistor budget on this part. To be crystal clear, yeah, we could totally have put 50 TOPS, 40 TOPS NPU on this product, but doing so would also require us to cut down cores, change core counts GPU cores, start to make trade-offs in certain dimensions of performance that enthusiasts really care about – and doesn’t seem like the right mix. We also had a long discussion about a sort of enthusiast market behavior around AI as a whole. And I think it’s fair to say it’s somewhat cautious.”
Instead, Intel believes that software developers don’t always effectively use AI devices, and a mix of components (CPU, GPU, NPU) is better than just an NPU, and compressing various AI models effectively enough so that they can’t be compressed. You don’t need a huge NPU. Finally, the Arrow Lake-S (Core Ultra 200S series) has a total of 36 TOPS. Although Arrow Lake contains an integrated GPU, many customers will pair the chip with a separate GPU, which provides much greater AI power than just an NPU.
Hallock said: “We have proven that the 13-TOPS NPU unit for Meteor Lake is more than sufficient. We have somewhat skeptical enthusiastic users, so we sized the NPU unit to accommodate all these constraints while maintaining CPU performance and protection that people care a lot about and still providing enough AI to handle the workloads that pipeline.”
It is interesting to note that Intel will introduce two chipsets for mobile phones in the Arrow Lake family during the first quarter of 2024. One of them, bearing the codename Arrow Lake-HX, will serve as a mobile replica version of the Core Ultra 200S chips that Intel will begin shipping in a few days. Weeks. The second Arrow Lake-H chip family for laptops overall offers significantly more TOPS than Arrow Lake-S or -HX: 99 TOPS in total. However, this will come from an enhanced GPU that uses XMX extensions and more Xe cores. The NPU unit will still provide 13 TOPS.
Roger Chandler, Intel’s VP and General Manager of Enthusiast PCs and Workstations Product Marketing, echoed Hallock’s statement – that software developers don’t effectively utilize the full capabilities of current NPU units. He said that Intel’s goal is to provide a “balanced platform.”
Chandler said: “When I look at AI now, I find that we’re after 10 seconds of a 20-hour movie.”
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on October 10th but has been updated to include links to reviews of the Core Ultra 200S.
