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

41–50 of 187 posts

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

#41

Post by aurareturn »

Numerlor wrote: post #35
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 i…

Lunar Lake throttles a lot. It can lose 50% of its performance on battery life. It's not the same as Apple Silicon where the performance is exactly the same plugged in or not.

Lunar Lake is also very slow in ST and MT compared to Apple.

Qualcomm's X Elite 2 SoCs have a much better chance of duplicating the Macbook experience.

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

#42

Post by aurareturn »

ytch wrote: post #28
cubefox wrote: post #8

Any speculation on what the equivalent TSMC node is for Intel 18A?

https://x.com/Kurnalsalts/status/1962173515815424003 Logic Density (may be inaccurate, also it's not the only metric for performance ): Raipidus 2nm ≈ TSMC N2 > TSMC N3B > TSMC N3E/P > Intel 18A ≈ Samaung 3GAP But 18A/20A already has PowerVia, while TSMC will implement Backside Power Delivery in A16 (next generation of N2)

So 18A is roughly TSMC N4P. N4P is part of the N5 family.

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

#43

Post by kergonath »

lostlogin wrote: post #38
octoberfranklin wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Apple is very consistent. You have the MacBook Air (lighter, more portable variant) and the MacBook Pro (more expensive and powerful variant). They don’t mess around with model numbers.

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

#44

Post by kakacik »

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?

1) tick AI checkbox 2) ??? 3) profit

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

#45

Post by aurareturn »

chasil wrote: post #34
compounding_it wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They didn't skip it.

They have Intel 7, Intel 4, Intel 3 nodes. Anyways, Intel's names do not equal to the same number on TSMC. They're usually 1 or 1.5 generation behind with the same name.

So Intel 3 would be something like TSMC N6.

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

#46

Post by edgineer »

lostlogin wrote: post #38
octoberfranklin wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Apple did not invent the -book suffix for model names of notebook computers.

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

#47

Post by vbezhenar »

pjmlp wrote: post #40
gambiting wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's open source:

https://github.com/intel/linux-npu-driver

https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux...

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

#48

Post by [deleted] »

kergonath wrote: post #43
lostlogin wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Apple is very consistent. You have the MacBook Air (lighter, more portable variant) and the MacBook Pro (more expensive and powerful variant). They don’t mess around with model numbers.

[deleted]

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

#49

Post by fancyfredbot »

Two things stand out to me:

1) Battery life claims are specific and very impressive, possibly best in class 2) Performance claims are vague and uninspiring.

Either this is an awful press release or this generation isn't taking back the performance crown.

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

#50

Post by WithinReason »

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…

Their comparisons claim to be performing better than both
Post reply on HN