Why would you be interested in a 'new' processor
or a 'new' graphics card, in the face of the spectacular advances in the field of 'software',
the field of algorithms, which, as it turns out, are working miracles in cutting edge
areas such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, etc. And there's something else that has diminished
people's interest in this species of hardware components even more: the fact that year after
year, each so-called 'new' processor or graphics card, has been almost every time... variations
on the same theme. Of course, there have been some improvements
from one generation to the next, but too small and too unremarkable to represent a reason
for excitement. Okay, a bigger cache, x more megahertz, that
is, nothing revolutionary. And the absolute champion of standing still
in recent years has undoubtedly been Intel. In fact, the slowness and stinginess of their
'upgrades' from one generation to the next, have become downright proverbial, fodder for
the memes that abound on the internet. Ah, Intel was like the rock, over and alongside
which the water passes. New competing technologies have come along,
such as the ARM chips on Apple laptops, new trends have come along, such as generative
AI and others, Intel remained unmoved with their processors... on 14 nanometers for years,
then on 10 nanometers, also for years, and then instead of shaking off their self-sufficiency,
they chose to modify the names of the processors and of the manufacturing processes, to SEEM
more modern, like Intel 7, Intel 4, blah, blah, blah, and so, their processors from
series 14 are like those from series 13, which are like those from series 12. And gradually, people began to lose interest
in the news from this field. Of course, that doesn't mean that the others
have been much better. I see that AMD has also come up with new names
for their processors meant to confuse the user, so that it's not too clear what is really
new and what is more... from the day before yesterday. Don't you worry about what we've put in our
laptop, just shut up and buy our shares! And then, of course, apathy sets in even among
enthusiasts. But look, Intel has finally woken from their
sleep, and has announced a new generation of mobile processors for laptops, one that
seems to be finally... something else: Meteor Lake! But why should it be different this time,
what makes this launch different from the previous ones? Well, the very structure of the new processors
is different. For the first time, Intel comes with a modular
design, different from anything they have released so far. It's about the way silicon is split between
the various components of the new processor. And the new Meteor Lake processors will have
4 tiles, or actually even 5 such modules, depending on how you look at the structure. And they are as follows: a SoC module, which
includes the memory controller, chips for wireless connections like WiFi and Bluetooth,
but also a new element... at least for Intel, because such similar modules
have existed on phone chips for a while now, a so-called NPU, or neural processing unit,
and we will discuss immediately what it is and what it does, and also on this tile, we
find some of our older acquaintances, the efficient cores, those E-cores designed not
for brute performance, but for reduced energy consumption. That's why I said earlier that we can consider
that there are actually 5 'modules', given that this description so far includes both
a 'traditional' structure and this new NPU. We will develop the topic later, and we will
also demystify this pompous name a bit, meaning... the NPU doesn't quite perform the miracles
you might think, or at least not yet. Then we have another tile that accommodates
the performance cores, the so-called P Cores, and several more efficient cores. Another module is responsible for fast connectivity:
Thunderbolt 4, USB, PCI Express ports. And last but not least, the fourth module
structurally and the fifth functionally, is the graphics module. Meteor Lake is therefore a combination of
technologies, some used by Intel in the past, such as these different cores depending on
their purpose, i.e., performance or energy efficiency, and some newer, such as this modular
structure or the Neural Processing Unit, both of which are firsts for Intel. So we can consider that the Meteor Lake processors
released today are a step forward. Something like... a small step for technology,
a giant leap for Intel, kind of the opposite of what Neil Armstrong said about the moon
landing. But before we get into the details, there's
something else you need to know: Intel has renamed their processors again, the famous
i is disappearing, you know, the one from i5, i7, i9 blah, blah, and we will have core
3, 5, 7, 9, but also some, now called Core Ultra, focused on efficiency. So, the purpose in the world of this latter
species, from which I will show you an example immediately and put it to work, is to drastically
reduce energy consumption, without compromising... too much I would add, the performance, and
at the same time offer everything: a more powerful graphics chip, AI functions, higher
speeds for memories, Thunderbolt 4, hardware acceleration for certain popular codecs, etc. And because the story with P-Cores and E-Cores
is probably familiar to you from the past, from the previous series of Intel processors,
I won't insist on them, and I will focus here on the two elements of novelty: this Neural
Processing Unit, and the Graphics Processing Unit. Let's start with the NPU and dispelling the
mythology that surrounds it. No, it's not a Chat GPT or a Midjourney in
your pocket, like your personal elf in a laptop that writes your dissertation while you procrastinate,
but it currently has a more mundane function: that of improving the user experience of the
respective product in terms of energy efficiency and resource allocation. But, in time, Intel says, the 'programmability'
of this dedicated chip will accelerate the adoption of new AI capabilities, as developers
come up with optimizations, dedicated software, and improvements. The graphics module in turn, comes with an
Intel Arc GPU, which is very modern and efficient. The intensive graphics and AI capabilities
are found in a separate module, while acceleration for media content and image display on the
screen are part of the SoC, to save energy when the applications being run do not require
more serious graphical power. So, that's roughly and very briefly today's
revolution: a new processor, with a new and modular structure, aimed at the best possible
balance between performance and energy efficiency, and which will exclusively power portable
devices, i.e., laptops. And now let's unveil the star of this video:
so what do we have here? Well, a laptop with such an Intel processor
from the new Meteor Lake series! This is the new and interesting Zenbook 14
OLED... 2024 so to speak, the first laptop from next
year's crop, which comes with an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H! And I think we can consider the presence of
this laptop in this video an event in itself, because we have the opportunity to firsthand
test what can... or cannot do, the new Intel processors. Theory is all well and good, let's see how
we do with practice and the power of example! The laptop is very cool, I already feel a
breeze from 2024, and after I test the new Intel, I will comment at length on the laptop
itself. But this time we'll start from the inside. From what I've learned, this laptop would
have three engine variants: Core Ultra 5 125H, Ultra 7 155H, which is the one we have here,
and the top dog Ultra 9 185H. And you realize that I was quite curios to
see what the new processor can do, but also how it compares to previous models, and with
the competition. So I quickly threw a Cinebench R23 on it after
I tinkered in MyAsus app that controls various settings, where I disabled the battery optimization
for efficiency and set the cooling to Performance mode. And I discovered, to my pleasant surprise,
that I wasn't too far off the results given by Intel as a reference. You know, usually, companies tests on their
own products, are a bit more optimistic than reality, and it's normal for that to be the
case, for marketing reasons. I'm not saying they just lie, but that the
testing is done under more special conditions, like a certain ambient temperature, with certain
maximized settings, with certain special drivers, maybe you even have to sacrifice a black chicken
at sunset, you get what I mean. Hallelujah, that wasn't the case here, we
were about where they said it would be. But before I reveal the result, I'll keep
you in suspense a little longer and tell you what I did until then. First, I lost more than an hour to update
that damn Windows. So this operating system, in this respect,
is death. I took the laptop out of the box, set it up,
and then it was... updates. Do it with a restart, have another coffee,
then another one and another one, and the updates kept pouring! Then what I have to tell you before the results,
is the configuration: this new ZenBook 14 has an Intel Core Ultra 155H processor, so
neither the weakest nor the strongest in the new generation, with a total of 16 physical
cores, of which 6 are performance cores and 10 are efficient, and 22 threads, 16GB LPDDR
5x RAM, a 1TB NVME SSD, and by the way, unlike the memory which is soldered onto the motherboard,
the SSD is standalone and can be easily replaced, and an Intel Arc graphics accelerator, mentioned
earlier, with a shared memory of 8GB. And now that we know the data of the problem,
let's talk about the results and see how things stand. So at a first run of Cinebench R23, cold and
with all the battery and cooling settings optimized for performance, I got a score of
12,114 points in multicore and 1,765 points in single core, very close to the scores announced
by Intel. And the first thing that came to my mind was
to quickly look at the scores obtained by the new Macs with M3 launched just last month,
probably what you're thinking too, and I want to say that I was pleasantly surprised to
see that the situation does not look bad for Intel. Keep in mind that the Intel processor we're
talking about here is not some gaming champion, installed on a laptop as big as an aircraft
carrier and with corresponding cooling, but a processor designed primarily for energy
efficiency and mounted on a laptop a little thicker than a sheet of paper. And the comparison is honorable. Depending on the number of cores, the M3 Pro,
the model with 12 cores on the CPU and 18 on the GPU, scores about 15,000 points, and
the weakest M3, the one with 8 cores on the CPU and 10 on the GPU, about 10,000 and a
bit. Sure, we're not comparing apples to apples,
we're talking about different operating systems and architectures, but I forced this comparison
a bit, to at least have an indicative idea of where this model stands. Certainly, the more powerful versions of this
first batch of Meteor Lake processors are even closer to the scores of Apple laptops,
which many have come to consider benchmarks on this side of mobile performance, that is,
able to deliver processing power, but equally autonomy, energy efficiency and portability. The next step was to give it a 10-minute loop
of Cinebench R23 to see how hot it gets, how much it consumes, and what the frequency,
temperature, and power consumption curve looks like. And it goes like this: in the first round,
the processor started strong and reached a maximum frequency of 4.8GHz, more precisely
4789MHZ, but also a respectable consumption of almost 60W, 57.97 to be precise, and a
huge temperature of 107 degrees Celsius. But immediately, in the next rounds, it calmed
down, the frequency dropped to around 2600MHz, the consumption between 25 and 30W, i.e.,
in the manufacturer-indicated zone of 28W, and the temperature stabilized at around 80
degrees, and that's how the values remained until the 10th and last run. I then ran some tests from the 3D Mark suite,
and in TimeSpy I got a graphics score of 3461 points, above Intel's indicated score of 3300,
in Wild Life Extreme Unlimited 4726, and that, for some reason, is much below the 6400 obtained
by Intel. And the XeSS test refused to return results. These latter errors, because I don't know
what else to call them, can be linked to many causes, but most likely it's about the novelty
of the product, about drivers, optimizations, etc. The truth is that I ran the tests on a graphics
driver provided by Intel, that I installed manually. The time available for troubleshooting was
not very generous either, I received the laptop the day before yesterday, so... I will come back to the tests, as the software
support improves. More for amusement, I also installed a Cyberpunk
2077, although clearly this is not a gaming laptop, and the results were predictable:
the game ran between 20 and 30 frames per second, so I don't think it can be qualified
as playable. But if you stubbornly want to play CS :GO
or some other game that's not very demanding in terms of resources, I think you can do
it. But definitely neither the processor, nor
the laptop as a whole, are designed for this. The present Zenbook 14 is an ultra-portable,
designed for energy efficiency, autonomy, portability, and as tasks, for office, multimedia,
streaming, browsing, online conferences, the usual stuff. Out of curiosity, I also disassembled it to
see its cooling, and it is as I expected: you can see a single heatpipe and a single
fan, and not a very strong one either. And given that the cooling is a bit small,
probably designed to be accommodated in a 1.2Kg laptop and not even one and a half centimeters
thick, certain consequences arise. The laptop gets quite warm on the belly, but
not excessively, and above the keyboard, that is at the base of the screen, but you don't
really reach there with your fingers. Also, under load, it becomes quite noisy,
and the sound made by the fan is high-pitched and therefore quite annoying. On the other hand, the laptop has other advantages
and benefits, and I think it's time to talk more about it. It has, for example, a huge battery, at least
for its dimensions and frugal processor, of 75Wh, I saw that since I disassembled it,
which should offer it a more than decent autonomy for this category of Windows laptops. In just the two days I had to play with it,
I some good battery hours in normal use: Netflix, Youtube, office, browsing, social media, i.e.,
lighter and less intensive tasks, and the power management system and intelligent resource
allocation seems to work well. However, a more serious battery test remains
on my to-do list. Another chapter where the laptop excels, is
the screen. I don't have enough words of praise for how
good the OLED implemented by Asus on this laptop is. I understand the panels are made by Samsung,
and they look dreamy. I measured it 3 times to be sure the values
are correct, and they proved to be not just correct, but downright impressive. Our colorimeter gave it a rating of 4.5 out
of 5 points, and not for nothing. The screen covers 100% of the sRGB standard,
98% Adobe RGB, and 97% P3. Being OLED, black is absolute, it gave an
absolute 0 in measurements, even at the maximum brightness of this 400-nit display. Sure, 400 nits is not a value that will blow
your retina, i.e., it's not the brightest monitor possible, not by a long shot, but
it is sufficient even for outdoor work. And there's something else remarkable: a very
good uniformity of colors and brightness even at full brightness, 100%, which I have seen
less often. But ideal uniformity is at 83% brightness,
where the highest delta E measured was 2, in the lower left corner of the screen, the
rest of the quadrants being all below this value. At 50% brightness, all values are below 1.5. So overall, for gamut, tone response, and
contrast, it received 5 out of 5 stars, and for brightness uniformity, color uniformity,
and the accuracy of the latter 4.5. This means you're dealing with a very good
display, which makes the laptop suitable even for photo editing, video content consumption,
etc. And the goodies of this screen do not end
here: it has a high resolution of 2880 by 1800 pixels, so a 16:10 format which I like
a lot because I have more vertical visible surface, good for documents, an excellent
screen-to-body ratio of almost 90%, because it has extremely narrow edges, and not least,
a decent frequency of 120Hz, which can be set as fixed from the My Asus app, or as dynamic,
like on phones, depending on the displayed content. So a 3K OLED screen at 120Hz, with such accuracy
and uniformity specifications revealed by measurements, is no small feat. Moving on to connectivity, although very thin
and light, this new ZenBook 14 does not compromise. On the right side, we have two USB C ports,
but both support Thunderbolt 4, the fastest current data transfer standard, and both also
support charging. Meaning the small and elegant 65W brick charges
the 75Wh battery via a USB-C connector. Simple and elegant, but I have an objection. I would have liked to have such a port on
one side and another on the other. The laptop forces me to power it through the
right side, which is where I sometimes have the mouse, whether wired or wireless. Also on the right, there's a headphones and
microphone combo jack and last but not least, a full HDMI port, and 2.1 on top of that. These are indeed current features. On the left side... you have a single port,
but undoubtedly useful: a full-size USB 3.2 Gen 1, and also on this side there are 3 small
slots for cooling. The ZenBook 14 remains thus... simple and
elegant, but at the same time quite well-equipped in terms of connections. And it's also good on the wireless side, with
WiFi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3, so there's no cause for concern here either. And now let's move on to the interaction and
finally to the build quality. I told you that this time we did it backwards
from usual, from the inside out, because in the end the interior is completely new, we've
seen ZenBooks before. Good, so the keyboard and touchpad. The keyboard is cool, the keys are well-spaced,
generous in surface, meaning easy and precise to hit, have a good travel of 1.4mm, they
are not very noisy, except for the space key which sounds like a frying pan. Another observation is that the power button
is included in the top row of narrow keys, and I don't think it's a very happy placement. It is between Delete and Print Screen, and
not once have I turned off the laptop trying to delete something or take a screenshot. The only difference is how it feels when pressed,
the travel is more rigid, otherwise it is absolutely identical to the others. Also miniature are the home, end, page-up,
and page-down keys, but I've already gotten used to this layout. The touchpad, however, is excellent. It's quite large, at least for the dimensions
of this laptop, it's quick and precise and also has that numpad trick that you can activate
with a simple press of this icon in the top right. You don't have to press too hard on this drawing
on the right, and voil , the physical keyboard is complemented by a very useful and perfectly
functional numeric keypad. And that's not all. In the upper left part of the trackpad, you
have another icon from where you set the level of brightness of this virtual keyboard with
just a touch: more discreet and economical, or brighter, therefore more legible. A gimmick as simple as it is smart. And last but not least... the appearance and build. The laptop looks very good. I received the black version for testing,
but there is also an equally beautiful white one. The laptop is robust, or anyway robust enough
to meet a military standard 810H, whatever that means. It is full aluminum, and it feels that way,
it's rigid, it doesn't wobble or creak, the hinge is how I like it, in the middle, long
and very solid, it offers a sufficient and pleasant resistance to closing and opening
and allows the laptop's screen to unfold up to 180 degrees. I also notice that Asus has given up on that
system where the base of the screen acts as a lever that further raises the belly of the
laptop off the desk, but it's not necessary, because the rubber inserts underneath are
high enough to ensure airflow through the intakes on the belly. The laptop is 1.5cm at its thickest point
and only weighs 1.2 Kg in total, which are very attractive specs for an ultraportable. And not least, somehow also on the part of
features and construction, it comes with two Harman Kardon certified speakers that sound
more than decent. I know it's not a compliment, but I didn't
expect it. Usually, these ultra-thin laptops have a mediocre
sound, without bass and depth, but this one actually sounds good. It also has a webcam capable of facial recognition,
equipped with an ambient light intensity sensor, which allows the display to adjust its brightness
and color temperature. Added to all this, are some AI features, by
the way of what we were talking about at the beginning, like background removal, automatic
reframing depending on your position relative to the camera, and also that weird, creepy
feature that makes you look like you're always looking into the camera lens, even if you're
actually staring somewhere else. Ah, and it also has something small but important,
namely a physical switch, a slider, with which you cover the camera if you want to avoid
prying eyes. And unlike other Asus models I've tested and
where I broke my nails, this one actually works smoothly. Okay, that's about it for the ZenBook 14 2024,
a laptop clearly from the future. I like it, and I'm glad that manufacturers
with a long history in technology, are starting to align with the new standards and trends. Thanks to the new Intel processors, the laptop
consumes less, which is important for a device that wants to be truly mobile and portable,
the performance is decent for its reduced form factor, ergonomics are very good, the
screen is exceptional, the design is beautiful, the construction is solid and the attention
to finishes and details is outstanding. And now you tell me in the comments section:
what do you think about the new processors released by Intel? Is Intel back in the game or not? I am eager to see what else comes from this
new generation of processors, and especially I am curious to see what they will bring in
the area of high performance and gaming. And last but not least, how do you like and
what do you think of this very capable and friendly ZenBook 14 2024, which, you see,
comes as a pleasant surprise in the preview of the major launches at CES early next year? Subscribe to our tiny channel, and with that,
enough for today. Thank you and I wish you all the best!
