Teams across Intel ‘turned over every rock’ to build the Intel Core Ultra 200V processor family, meeting laptop buyers’ demands for more endurance, more speed and new capabilities.
InTel’s new Ultra 200V
What do laptop improvement people ask for the most? You can probably guess – is better battery life. Nobody enjoys hunting for power outlets in airports or hotel lobbies. However battery life isn’t the only factor taken into account when considering a laptop up-grade. The top priority that creates the need for a new model to replace an older system is definitely speed, and while this might seem counterintuitive, reality is that the key to better battery life is actually better processing speed.
This is what the team behind the Intel® Core™ Ultra 200V series processors (code-named Lunar Lake) discovered. They came together “all for one target,” says Arik Gihon, Intel senior principal engineer of SoC Architecture. “We had new competition showing good performance – roughly equal to what we have – but with much lower power.”
‘Intel Needed Something Special’
To fight back, he says, “We needed something special.” That meant “loosening up the constraints” of building a product that could be adapted across a wider set of the PC market and focusing on thin-and-light laptops and more tablet-like fan-less devices. “The story was efficiency,” Gihon explains, “and we literally turned over every rock.”
The result of the development process is Intel’s new Core Ultra 200V. It’s a processor able to power AI PC laptops and one that draws as much as 40% less power than its predecessor, which itself was a radical re-architecture focused on efficiency. The new Core Ultra delivers several more hours of battery life — and, critically, similarly large gains in performance, graphics and AI.
Sleep, Wake, Work, Fast
What dictates sleep, however, has evolved. “PC users work with quite a lot of applications running in the background and the foreground,” Gihon says, so it’s not display activity but rather the mix of applications running that shapes the processor’s response.
One way the Dev team found power savings was to get more applications running on the Efficient-cores, or E-cores. “The thing that allowed us to use the E-core more than the previous generation – on most of the applications – is that we actually improved its performance, not its efficiency.” Gihon added.
When Intel first introduced hybrid chips with two kinds of cores, the priority was performance. A chip first ran its P-cores, and then E-cores provided additional processing power when required. For the Core Ultra platforms, however, the priority is efficiency.
Introducing this new power management scheme “was a big risk,” he adds, since it required breaking the previous working model. “That was a huge challenge – but since we wanted it so much, we were able to overcome it.”
From a Design Standpoint, ‘One of the Biggest Projects’
On top of all of that, the new processor provides up-to a 50% improvement in graphics performance – “we have tons of horsepower for AI,” adds Gihon. Core Ultra 200V series processors are ready to speed up the several hundred features and AI models already available or the next on-device AI developers will dream up.
