Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Intel Core Ultra Series 3 Debut as First Built on Intel 18A

newsroom.intel.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 187 posts

Re: Intel Core Ultra Series 3 Debut as First Built on Intel 18A

#31

Post by chrismorgan »

gambiting wrote: post #20
chrismorgan wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I assume 9 is better than 7 right? Right? Oh, the number of times I’ve heard someone assume their five- or ten-year-old machine must be powerful because it’s an i7… no, the i3-14100 (released two years ago) is uniformly significantly superior to the i7-9700 (released five years before that), and only falls behind the i9-9900 in multithreaded performance. Within the same product family and generation, I expect 9 is…

>>Within the same product family and generation, I expect 9 is better than 7 Ah the good old Dell laptop engineering, where the i9 is better on paper, but in reality it throttles within 5 seconds of starting any significant load and the cpu nerfs itself below even i5 performance. Classic Dell move.

Within the same family and generation, I don’t think this should happen any more. But especially in the past, some laptops were configurable with processors of different generations or families (M, Q, QM, U, so many possibilities) so that the i7 option might have worse real-world performance than the i5 (due to more slower cores).

Re: Intel Core Ultra Series 3 Debut as First Built on Intel 18A

#32

Post by jauntywundrkind »

Xe3 GPU could be super super super great. Xe2 is already very strong, and this could really be an incredible breakout moment.

The CPU are also probably also fine!

Intel is so far ahead with consumer multi-chip. AMD has done amazing with having an IOD+CCD (io / core complex dies) chiplet split up (basically having a northbridge on package), but is just trying to figure out how in 2027's Medusa Point they're going to make a decent mainline APU multi-chip, can't keep pushing monolithic APU dies like they have (but they've been excellent FWIW). Like Intel's been doing with sweet EIMB, breaking the work up already, and hopefully is reaping the reward here. Stashing some tiny / very low power cores on the "northbridge" die is a genius move that saves incredible power for light use, a big+little+tiny design that let's the whole CCD shut down while work happens. Some very nice high core configs. Panther Lake could be super exciting.

18A with backside power delivery / "PowerVia" could really be a great leap for Intel! Nice big solid power delivery wins, that could potentially really help. My fingers are so very crossed. Really hope the excitement for this future arriving pans out, at least somewhat!

Their end of year Nova Lake with b(ig)LLC and an even bigger newer NPU6 (any new features beyond TOps?) is also exciting. I hope that also includes the incredible Thunderbolt/USB4 connectivity Intel has typically included on mobile chips but not holding my breath. Every single mobile part is capable of 4X Thunderbolt 5. That is sick. I really hope AMD realizes the ball is in it's court on interconnects at some point!! 20 Lane PCIe configs are also very nice to have for mobile.

Lunar Lake was quite good for what it was, very amazing well integrated chip, with great characteristics. As a 2+4 big/little it wasnt enough for developers. But great consumer chip. I think Intel's really going to have a great total system design with Panther Lake. Yes!

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/intel-double...

Re: Intel Core Ultra Series 3 Debut as First Built on Intel 18A

#33

Post by webdevver »

ZuLuuuuuu wrote: post #17
sbinnee wrote: post #7

I will wait for the actual reviews from users. But I lost faith in Intel chips. I was in CES2024 and saw snapdragon X elite chip running a local LLM (llama I believe). How did it turn out? Users cannot use that laptop except for running an LLM. They had no plans for translation layer like Apple Rosetta. Intel would be different for sure in that regard, but I just don't think that it will fly against Ryzen AI chips or…

Isn't it a bit exaggerating to say that users cannot use Snapdragon laptops except for running LLMs? Qualcomm and Microsoft already has a translation layer named Prism (not as good as Rosetta but pretty good nevertheless): https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/arm/apps-on-arm-x8... I agree with losing faith in Intel chips though.

>Isn't it a bit exaggerating to say that users cannot use Snapdragon laptops except for running LLMs?

I think maybe what OP meant was that the memory occupied by the model meant you couldn't do anything alongside inferecing, e.g. have a compile job or whatever running (unless you unload the model once you've done asking it questions.)

to be honest, we could really do with RAM abundance. Imagine if 128GB ram became like 8GB ram is today - now that would normalize local LLM inferencing (or atleast, make a decent attempt.)

ofcourse youd need the bandwidth too...

Re: Intel Core Ultra Series 3 Debut as First Built on Intel 18A

#34

Post by chasil »

compounding_it wrote: post #18
tuananh wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

tsmc n2 i think (2nm)

If that is the case then it's interesting how intel managed to catch up so quickly.

After their 7/10nm delay, they are bringing 2nm into production.

They skipped 5nm and 3nm, and that is indeed an accomplishment.

I hope the yeilds are high.

Re: Intel Core Ultra Series 3 Debut as First Built on Intel 18A

#35

Post by Numerlor »

sbinnee wrote: post #7

I will wait for the actual reviews from users. But I lost faith in Intel chips. I was in CES2024 and saw snapdragon X elite chip running a local LLM (llama I believe). How did it turn out? Users cannot use that laptop except for running an LLM. They had no plans for translation layer like Apple Rosetta. Intel would be different for sure in that regard, but I just don't think that it will fly against Ryzen AI chips or…

Lost faith from what? On x86 mobile Lunar lake chips are the clear best for battery life at the moment, and mobile arrowlake is competitive with amd's offerings. Only thing they're missing is a Strix halo equivalent but AMD messed that one up and there's like 2 laptops with it.

The new intel node seems to be kinda weaker than tsmc's going by the frequency numbers of the CPUs, but what'll matter the most in a laptop is real battery life anyway

Re: Intel Core Ultra Series 3 Debut as First Built on Intel 18A

#36

Post by [deleted] »

gambiting wrote: post #22
vbezhenar wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These processors have NPU (Neural Processing Unit) which is supposed to accelerate some small local neural networks. Nvidia RTX GPUs have much more powerful NPUs, so it's more about laptops without discrete GPU.

But like.....what for example. As a normal windows PC user, what kind of software can I run that will benefit from that NPU at all?

[deleted]

Re: Intel Core Ultra Series 3 Debut as First Built on Intel 18A

#37

Post by lostlogin »

cherioo wrote: post #27
DrammBA wrote: post #2

> Today at CES, Intel unveiled Intel Core Ultra Series 3 processors, the first AI PC platform built on Intel 18A process technology that was designed and manufactured in the United States. Powering over 200 designs from leading, global partners, Series 3 will be the most broadly adopted and globally available AI PC platform Intel has ever delivered. What in the world is this disaster of an opening paragraph? From the…

AI PC has been in the buzz for more than 2 years now (despite itself being a near useless concept), and intel has like 75% marketshare for laptop. Both of those are well with in norm for an intel marketing piece. It’s not really meant for consumer. Who would even visit newsroom.intel.com?

Apparently it’s been a thing for a while:

What is an AI PC? ('Look, Ma! No Cloud!')

An AI PC has a CPU, a GPU and an NPU, each with specific AI acceleration capabilities. An NPU, or neural processing unit, is a specialized accelerator that handles artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) tasks right on your PC instead of sending data to be processed in the cloud. https://newsroom.intel.com/artificial-intelligence/what-is-a...

Re: Intel Core Ultra Series 3 Debut as First Built on Intel 18A

#38

Post by lostlogin »

octoberfranklin wrote: post #11
DrammBA wrote: post #2

> Today at CES, Intel unveiled Intel Core Ultra Series 3 processors, the first AI PC platform built on Intel 18A process technology that was designed and manufactured in the United States. Powering over 200 designs from leading, global partners, Series 3 will be the most broadly adopted and globally available AI PC platform Intel has ever delivered. What in the world is this disaster of an opening paragraph? From the…

Laptop names are even worse: > Are ZBooks good or do I want an OmniBook or ProBook? Within ZBook, is Ultra or Fury better? Do I want a G1a or a G1i? Oh you sell ZBook Firefly G11, I liked that TV show, is that one good? https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2025/11/29/bikes...

And that root of all that shit lies Apple and the ‘book’ suffix.

Re: Intel Core Ultra Series 3 Debut as First Built on Intel 18A

#39

Post by cromka »

webdevver wrote: post #30
dangus wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel marketing isn’t the best but I am struggling to understand what issue you’re taking with this. It’s an AI PC platform. It can do AI. It has an NPU and integrated GPU. That’s pretty straightforward. Competitors include Apple silicon and AMD Ryzen AI. They’re predicting it’ll sell well, and they have a huge distribution network with a large number of partner products launching. Basically they’re saying every lapt…

i cant believe we're still putting NPUs into new designs. silicon taken up that couldve been used for a few more compute units on the GPU, which is often faster at inference anyway and way more useful/flexible/programmable/documented.

Guess they're following Apple here whose NPUs get all the support possible, as far as I can tell.

Re: Intel Core Ultra Series 3 Debut as First Built on Intel 18A

#40

Post by pjmlp »

gambiting wrote: post #22
vbezhenar wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These processors have NPU (Neural Processing Unit) which is supposed to accelerate some small local neural networks. Nvidia RTX GPUs have much more powerful NPUs, so it's more about laptops without discrete GPU.

But like.....what for example. As a normal windows PC user, what kind of software can I run that will benefit from that NPU at all?

It is another way Microsoft has tried to cater to OEMs as means to bring PC sales back to the glory exponential growth days, especially under the CoPilot+ PC branding, nowadays still siloed into Windows ARM.

In fairness NPUs can use less hardware resources than a general purpose discrete GPU, thus better for laptop workloads, however we all know that if a discrete GPU is available, there is not a technical reason for not using it, assuming enough local memory is available.

Ah, and NPUs are yet another thing that GNU/Linux folks would have to reverse engineer as well, as on Windows/Android/Apple OSes they are exposed via OS APIs, and there is yet no industry standard for them.

Post reply on HN