Meteor Lake vs Ryzen 8040 Hawk Point AI battle could be in AMD's favor as Core Ultra NPU tipped to only match Ryzen 7040 APUs

The Intel Meteor Lake family of laptop CPUs feature a Neural Processing Unit (NPU), a first for Intel chips. Per Intel, the NPU inside the Meteor Lake Core Ultra processors is meant for efficient AI operations on local hardware. However, if the latest Meteor Lake leak out of Moore’s Law Is Dead is accurate, Meteor Lake chips may not pack that much of an AI performance uplift over last-gen products.

Per one of the leaker’s “best” OEM sources, the NPU on the Core Ultra CPUs packs around 10 TOPS of compute performance. Although the number is allegedly preliminary, the source suggested that it is unlikely to have “gotten much better since my last briefing”.

Assuming the NPU inside the Core Ultra chips churns out 10 TOPS of compute, it would only match the current crop of AMD Ryzen 7040 Phoenix CPUs with the first-gen Ryzen AI and lag behind the Apple M3 which boasts 18 TOPS of NPU compute. Furthermore, AMD claims that the newly announced Ryzen 8040 Hawk Point APUs will bring 16 TOPS of NPU performance.

In other words, Meteor Lake’s AI advantage might be non-existent and Intel could find itself chasing AMD in 2024. This is exactly what MLID’s source suggests.

Fortunately, we don’t have to wait too long to find out what’s actually the case, as we are mere days away from the debut of the first Meteor Lake-powered laptops. Till then, take the information presented here with a grain of salt.

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