Intel Core Ultra 5 134U

The Intel Core Ultra 5 134U is a lower mid-range Meteor Lake family chip that debuted in December 2023. This 1st Gen Core Ultra processor has come to replace 13th generation Core chips; it has 12 cores (2 + 8 + 2) and 14 threads at its disposal. Its Performance cores, of which there are 2, are HT-enabled and run at up to 4.4 GHz while its Efficient cores, of which there are 10 (8 main cores plus 2 extra ones found in the Low Power Island) run at up to 3.6 GHz. The 4-core Intel Arc Graphics, just out of the oven, serves as the integrated graphics adapter - this runs at up to 1.75 GHz - and there is a bevy of other brand-new technologies on offer as well including the integrated AI Boost NPU with two Gen 3 engines for hardware AI workload acceleration.

Architecture & Features

Meteor Lake is a case of throwing everything at AMD (including the kitchen sink, yes) and seeing what sticks. With this product family, Intel intends to deliver higher CPU performance, higher GPU performance, higher hardware AI workload acceleration rates and longer battery life than what Raptor Lake chips were capable of. For those counting, that's four birds to kill with a single stone.

This generation of Intel Core processors features Redwood architecture P-cores and Crestwood architecture E-cores. Both come with slight architectural improvements over Raptor Cove and Gracemont respectively for slightly higher performance-per-clock figures; the interesting thing is that of the 10 E-cores, two are actually a separate cluster located on what Intel calls a "Low Power Island". Essentially, the latter is an SoC within an SoC that can stay active while most other parts of the chip are temporarily switched off to save power. The low-power E-cores run at up to 2.1 GHz. Intel hopes this approach will let it deliver unprecedentedly low power consumption figures when under low load, boosting battery life of laptops and tablets powered by Meteor Lake.

To build its Meteor Lake processors, Intel uses the Foveros technology (stacking several chips on top of each other). This is a cost-cutting measure more than anything else, as manufacturing several small dies on several different processes is so much cheaper than making a huge single die and hoping that there are no defects in it that will require disabling some parts of it.

Elsewhere, the Core Ultra 5 134U comes with 12 MB of L3 cache which is a significant reduction compared to the 24 MB that the 155H, the 165H and the 185H have. The processor has a small number of PCIe 4 and PCIe 3 lanes for NVMe SSD speeds up to 7.8 GB/s; it supports RAM running at up to 6400 MHz (LPDDR5-6400, LPDDR5x-6400, to be specific). vPro Enterprise and business-centric features such as the Remote Platform Erase are onboard as well. Naturally, the 134U also features built-in Thunderbolt 4 support and Intel CNVi Wi-Fi support. It is also worth mentioning that Intel chose to keep native SATA III support that AMD had removed from its Ryzen processors quite a while ago.

The 134U is compatible with 64-bit Windows 10, 64-bit Windows 11 and with many Linux distros.

Performance

While we have no way of knowing what the 134U will be like, as of December 2023, it's safe to expect the chip to be just a few percentage points behind the Core i5-1335U (Raptor Lake, 10 cores, 12 threads, up to 4.6 GHz), as far as multi-thread performance is concerned.

Either way, real-world performance of the chip may vary significantly depending on how high the CPU power limits are and how competent the cooling solution of the system is.

Graphics

The 4-core Arc Graphics runs at up to 1.75 GHz. We expect the iGPU to be a little slower than the aging 96 EU Iris Xe iGPU.

A proper DX12 Ultimate graphics adapter, the Arc Graphics is no stranger to ray tracing and other modern technologies including AI frame generation (XeSS). It will let you connect up to four SUHD 4320p monitors and it will both HW-encode and HW-encode the most widely used video codecs including AVC, HEVC and AV1 in a fast and efficient manner.

Your mileage may vary depending on how high the CPU power limits are, how competent the cooling solution of your system is, how fast the RAM of your system is.

Power consumption

This Core Ultra 5 series processor has a Base power consumption of 9 W, with 30 W being its maximum Intel-recommended Turbo power consumption. An active cooling solution is a must for a system powered by this chip.

The 134U is comprised of several small chips ("tiles") that are connected using Intel's Foveros technology. The tile containing main CPU cores is produced on the fairly modern 7 nm Intel process marketed as Intel 4 while most other tiles (the iGPU, the I/O die, ...) are built with TSMC's N5 and N6 processes. The base tile is built with the old Intel 22FFL process.

Series	Intel Intel Meteor Lake-U
Codename	Meteor Lake-U
Series: Intel Meteor Lake-U Meteor Lake-U Intel Core Ultra 7 164U 3.8 - 4.8 GHz 12 / 14  12 MB L3 Intel Core Ultra 5 134U « 3.6 - 4.4 GHz 12 / 14  12 MB L3
Clock Rate	3600 - 4400 MHz
Level 3 Cache	12 MB
Number of Cores / Threads	12 / 14 2 x 4.4 GHz Intel Redwood Cove P-Core 8 x 3.6 GHz Intel Crestmont E-Core 2 x 2.1 GHz Intel Crestmont E-Core
Power Consumption (TDP = Thermal Design Power)	9 Watt
Manufacturing Technology	7 nm
Max. Temperature	110 °C
Features	LPDDR5-6400/LPDDR5x-6400 RAM, PCIe 4, Thr. Director, DL Boost, AI Boost, vPro Enterp., RPE, MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE4.1, SSE4.2, AES, AVX, AVX2, AVX-VNNI, FMA3, SHA
GPU	Intel Graphics 4-Cores iGPU (Arc) ( - 1750 MHz)
64 Bit	64 Bit support
Architecture	x86
Announcement Date	12/14/2023
Product Link (external)	ark.intel.com

Benchmarks

- Range of benchmark values for this graphics card
- Average benchmark values for this graphics card
* Smaller numbers mean a higher performance

No reviews found for this CPU (yet).