News

The Intel Core Ultra 300 have 5th Gen NPUs, but what about the previous ones?

For some time now, when buying a laptop, you should not only take into account which processor is inside and which, to a large extent, is responsible for offering greater or lesser performance. autonomy. Furthermore, we must also take into account the power that is capable of offering the NPU.

The NPU, known as Neural Processing Unitis the one in charge of carrying out tasks related to the Artificial intelligence locally, that is, without depending on an Internet connection. Intel, amd and Qualcomm (the latest to hit the laptop processor market with ARM architecture) incorporate a dedicated NPU for these tasks.

If we talk about Qualcomm’s NPU in its processors, we are talking about the first generation. Regarding AMD, we are currently in the third generation with the launch of the Ryzen AI 300. The first was the one included in the Ryzen 7040 while the second is found in the Ryzen 8040.

Intel NPU Evolution

But what about Intel? Intel has released a patch for the Linux kernel where, according to the guys at Phoronix, you can read that the next generation of Intel laptop processors, Series 300, will have a new generation of NPUspecifies the 5th. How can it be the fifth and it has only launched two ranges of processors with NPU?

The theory says that the first NPU that we know of from Intel was the one found in the Intel Core Ultra 100 Series and that it had a computing power of 11.5 TOPS. Intel’s second NPU is the one currently found in processors Intel Core Ultra 200 Series with a computing power of 48 TOPS, thus entering the denomination PC with AI from Microsoft.

But, the next will be the 5th generation, according to the notes found in the Linux kernel update that we have discussed. Based on this information, it is logical to ask the question: where are the rest of the Intel NPU generations?

Well, it turns out that Intel’s evolution with NPUs is not like that. Intel’s first NPU, or 1st generation NPU It is from 2018 and offered a ridiculous computing power of only 0.5 TOPS. The second generation is from 2021 and had 7 TOPS calculation. Here are the two generations that we were missing in the equation and so it was difficult to understand how it is possible that the Intel Core Ultra 300 Series arrive with the 5th generation.

intel core ultra 200v processor specifications

Seeing how the computing power of Intel NPUs has evolved from one year to the next, going from 11.5 TOPS of Intel Core Ultra Series 1 to 48 TOPS of Intel Core Ultra Series 2 processors, we can venture to say that this Next generation will approach 100 TOPS of computing power.

Qualcomm, like AMD, are already working on the next generation of processors with NPU for portable equipment. At the moment, both Intel, Qualcomm and AMD offer practically the same computing power for AI tasks, so it seems that the evolution in this field seems to be the same for all manufacturers.

Related Articles

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *