Intel silently expands Meteor Lake processor line with entry-level Core Ultra 5 115U

The Intel Core Ultra family of processors made their official debut in December of last year. Based on the Meteor Lake architecture, Intel first expanded the line in February of this year by adding the vPro-eligible processors. There are some additional SKUs that the chip manufacturer has released, but most of them haven’t received proper marketing treatment.

One of such processors is the Intel Core Ultra 5 115U. With no marketing materials, the CPU has been spotted on the official website, and it’s not as interesting as some of the other processors in the line. To be specific, it’s the lowest-tier CPU in the entire Meteor Lake family.

While most of the U-series chips from Meteor Lake come with 12 cores and 14 threads, this Core Ultra 5 115U has 8 cores and 10 threads. That is, it has four fewer cores than the other U-series processors. But that’s not the only entry-level aspect of the CPU.

Intel also has put less cache, clocked the maximum GPU and CPU frequencies slower, and integrated one less Intel Xe GPU core than the other U-series chips. All this makes the Intel Core Ultra 5 115U the slowest chip in the family. Things get even worse when you consider the power ratings.

The Core Ultra 5 115U has the same base 15-watt and max turbo of 57-watt power range as the Core Ultra 5 135U, which is a more capable CPU. Intel does have a more efficient chipset, the Core Ultra 5 134U, which has a base 9-watt and max turbo of 30-watt power range. However, the NPU of the processor is the same as that of the more powerful chips.

That suggests that Intel potentially designed the Core Ultra 5 115U as an AI acceleration chip, with the focus being AI tasks instead of others. We have yet to see a product featuring the chipset, but the processor did make its debut in Geekbench. So, the first devices with the CPU could be over the horizon.

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