Just a week after AMD revealed its own Ryzen 8040 hardware, Intel has entered its own era of ai PCs. The company's new Core Ultra laptop chips, codenamed Meteor Lake, are Intel's first processors to include an NPU, or neural processing unit, to speed up ai tasks.
Intel claims that the Core Ultra chips use up to 79 percent less power than AMD's next-generation Ryzen 7840U while idle in Windows, and are also up to 11 percent faster than AMD hardware for multithreaded tasks. Intel, however, did not have the upcoming Ryzen 8040 chips to test. They use the company's new Intel 4 (7nm) process and should be “the most efficient x86 processor for ultrathin systems.”
As for ai workloads, Intel says Core Ultra chips can reach up to 34 TeraOPS when combining performance across NPU, GPU, and CPU. The big difference is the NPU: it will enable features like Windows 11's Studio Effects, which can blur backgrounds and improve video lighting without affecting battery life much. With more creative ai workloads, Intel says the Ultra 7 165H is 70 percent faster than its Ryzen 7 7840U rival in Adobe Premiere Pro.
Check out the rest of Intel's specs and benchmarks here, and expect to hear more “ai PC” boasts in 2024.
Oh, and nothing to do with Intel chips, but get ready for everyone to play with ai-generated backgrounds on Instagram this week.
-Mat Smith
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Threads' new hashless tags are good for making jokes
Meta probably should have seen this coming.
Meta has finally rolled out search tags to all users on Threads, its microblogging arm of Instagram, and users are taking advantage of a design quirk to have a little fun. Thread “topic tags” are a lot like hashtags, but they are not exactly the same. For one thing, there is no hash (#). It's pretty basic stuff… which makes the effectiveness of a new joke seem even more absurd.
Someone can create a post in Threads, ideally with a lot of text, and then place a “Show more” tag at the end, seemingly in the middle of a word or sentence. You, the unwitting victim, will click “Show More” expecting to see the rest of the post, but surprise! — Instead, it will direct you to the page for that tag.
Ah, jokes. Just in time for the long-awaited European launch of Thread…
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Spider-Man 2's New Game+ mode delayed until 2024
Other features, such as audio descriptions, are also delayed.
When Insomniac Games was released spider man 2, It still didn't have features like New Game+ and audio descriptions. Marketing and community director James Stevenson shared that New Game+ “should” arrive before the end of 2023. But Insomniac has now issued a statement explaining that it is targeting the next spider man 2 update for early 2024. Insomniac went on to explain that it is adding more “highly requested features” to the game, such as repeating missions and changing the time of day.
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Engadget's Best Gaming Laptops
These are our favorites.
Gaming laptops have been some of the most intriguing portable PCs in recent years. They have become thinner and lighter, but also much more powerful and efficient, thanks to advanced CPUs and GPUs. Gaming laptops are where PC makers can venture, with things like rotating hinges and almost desktop-like customization. We detail the important specs, the price you can expect to pay, and some of our standout favorites.
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This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-morning-after-intel-unveils-its-first-chips-built-for-ai-work-121504827.html?src=rss
