Intel Core Ultra Series 3 Debut as First Built on Intel 18A • Hacker News Board

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

#61

Post by blell » Tue, Jan 06, 2026, 9:38 AM UTC

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.

Prism is not as good as Rosetta 2? At least Prism supports AVX.

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

#62

Post by pjmlp » Tue, Jan 06, 2026, 9:38 AM UTC

vbezhenar wrote: post #47

pjmlp wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

That is not an industry standard that works across vendors in an OS and GPU agnostic way, which is why Khronos has started a new standard effort.

https://www.khronos.org/events/building-the-foundation-for-a...

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

#63

Post by bebna » Tue, Jan 06, 2026, 9:57 AM UTC

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.

I got a MacBook. No, not an air or pro, just MacBook.

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

#64

Post by librasteve » Tue, Jan 06, 2026, 10:15 AM UTC

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.

waiting for a MacBook Vapour

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

#65

Post by alecco » Tue, Jan 06, 2026, 11:07 AM UTC

I really, really want Intel to do well. I like their open oneAPI for unified CPU-GPU programming. It would be nice to have some competition/alternative against NVIDIA and TSMC.

But I wont be investing time and money again on Intel while the same anti-engineering beancounter board is still there. For example, they never owned the recent Raptor Lake serious hardware issues and they never showed clients how this will never happen again.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raptor_Lake#Instability_and_de... "Intel has decided not to halt sales or recall any units"

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

#66

Post by HDThoreaun » Tue, Jan 06, 2026, 11:24 AM UTC

w-m wrote: post #52

“With Series 3, we are laser focused on improving power efficiency, adding more CPU performance, a bigger GPU in a class of its own, more AI compute and app compatibility you can count on with x86.” – Jim Johnson, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Client Computing Group, Intel A laser focus on five things is either business nonsense or optics nonsense. Who was this written for?

Well this is the consumer electronic showcase so I would say consumers who are looking at buying laptops

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

#67

Post by usagisushi » Tue, Jan 06, 2026, 11:26 AM UTC

sandGorgon wrote: post #10

this doesnt have integrated ram like lunar lake right ?

No, it's more like a power-efficient Arrow Lake, with fewer P-cores and more LE-cores. (e.g. P+E+LE: AL 6+8+2 vs. PL 4+8+4)

edit: fix typo

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

#68

Post by zmb_ » Tue, Jan 06, 2026, 11:33 AM UTC

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.

You can thank Microsoft for that. Intel architects in fact did not want to waste area on an NPU. That caused Microsoft to launch their AI-whatever branded PCs with Qualcomm who were happy to throw in whatever Microsoft wanted to get to be the launch partner. After than Intel had to follow suit to make Microsoft happy.

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

#69

Post by aurareturn » Tue, Jan 06, 2026, 11:33 AM UTC

Numerlor wrote: post #54

aurareturn wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nobody is duplicating the macbook experience because Apple is integrating both hardware and os, while others are fighting Windows, and OEMs being horrible at firmware. LNL should only power throttle when you go to power saver modes, battery life will suffer when you let it boost high on all cores but you're not getting great battery life when doing heavy all core loads either way. Overall MT should be better on Panth…

LNL throttles heavily even on the default profile, not just power saver modes.[0]

Meanwhile, Qualcomm's X Elite 1 did not throttle.

Lunar Lake uses TSMC N3 for compute tile. There is no node advantage. Yet, M4 is 42% faster in ST and M5 is 50% faster based on Geekbench 6 ST.

[0]https://www.pcworld.com/article/2463714/tested-intels-lunar-...

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

#70

Post by notenlish » Tue, Jan 06, 2026, 12:16 PM UTC

klardotsh wrote: post #13

sandGorgon wrote: post #10

this doesnt have integrated ram like lunar lake right ?

Nearly all modern SOCs have built in RAM now. Apple Silicon does it, AMD Strix Halo and beyond do it, Intel Lunar Lake does it, most ARM SOCs from vendors other than Apple do it… Now, unified memory shared freely between CPU and GPU would be cool, like Apple and AMD SH have, if that’s what you meant.

Isnt Strix Halo and apple's m series a bit different. Iirc you need to choose how much ram will be allocated to the igpu, whereas on mac it is all handled dynamically.