Core Ultra: Intel Under Performs ... Again

Intel has been on a steady decline for years unable to compete with a pace of innovation from AMD and apple no matter how much their marketing department tries to convince you otherwise in the laptop space specifically Intel now no longer represents Innovation instead Intel powered laptops now represent annoying fan noise abysmal battery life and laptops too hot to actually touch well today is the day that we get to see if the Intel curse has finally been lifted as with me are two of Intel's brand new meeting Lake laptops but I value your time so I'm just going to tell you the punchline without making you watch this video meteor lake is definitely a good step forward for Intel it is a decent amount more power efficient than last generation it delivers better integrated GPU performance and it accelerates some basic AI tasks but it doesn't offer any noticeable CPU performance improvements its product naming is an absolute confusing mess and it just isn't as revolutionary a product as Apple's M series of processors or amd's original Zen once were so now if you're interested in why I came to those conclusions here's the rest of the video let me first summarize what media Lake actually is basically it uses a new manufacturing process marketed as Intel 4 Intel 4 is a full node shrink relative to Intel 7 which is what their older 10th to 13th generation of processors used I'm not a computer engineer I'm a computer scientist but from my research what this means is that the change to Intel 4 should have an estimated 20% performance Improvement for the same power draw or a 40% reduction in power for the same performance so this manufacturing change alone should go a long way into helping it'll solve its primary issue which is that their processes require too much power for the performance they deliver in addition to this these new metor Lake processors finally have new integrated Graphics called Arc not to be confused with the nightclub from Sydney Australia that I used to DJ add anyway this replaces the abysmal integrated Graphics that we've been served up from Intel for the last s several years and Intel is including a neural processing unit to accelerate some AI tasks as well as other improvements such as support for newer faster low powerered memory Allin Intel claims that metor Lake will offer around 10% improved CPU performance than their prior 13th generation and 20% better graphics performance and finally with meteor Lake Intel is rebranding their product stack with a new naming convention and boy is it extremely confusing seriously it's like they're not only trying to compete with AMD and performance but also who has the most misleading and confusing product naming previously their processors were designated up H or HX which referred to the series of processor and the approximate performance they would deliver you for low powerered Ultrabooks all the way up to HX for huge performance Focus laptops then they had their legacy I5 i7 designations which referred to more modest performance differences within those Series this caused ridiculous situations where an i5 from Intel's H series would outperform and i7 from their U series meteor lake is changing The Branding of the processor to core Ultra and they're getting rid of the generation number which was previously at the beginning of their product name like 13th they are instead restarting it and calling it series 1 within series 1 just like before there will be ranges denoted by the letter at the end of the product name an H for high performance laptops and then a u for smaller lower powered Ultra box so they're getting rid of the P series which wasn't in between series which I think is positive as all these processors support variable wattage anyway Within These series there will be five seven and N models these are pretty much the same thing as the older i5 and i7 designations just without the eye here is a look at the full core Ultra H series product stack the main difference is that the core Ultra 5 has four performance and eight efficient cores whereas the core 7 and 9 get two extra performance cores the other differences are more minor clock increases as you go up the range compared to last year's 13th gen H series this is the same number of p and E Cor and they have very similar clock speeds so without an architecture change to these cores which as I understand these don't have I'd expect very similar CPU performance additionally these meteor processors do include two new LP cores which are rumored to support some basic tasks when the computer is asleep I'm very interested to see how these will be used anyway on the surface their product stack seems to be just as complex as it was before but here's where the wheels completely fall off the car apparently Intel are also releasing a 14th generation of processors for laptops around CES time this is a raptor Lake refresh of their 13th generation which uses their older Intel 7 manufacturing process apparently this will be confusingly branded as Intel Core I.E without Ultra in the name if the rumor mill is correct these will come in variance for very large powerful laptops as an update to the 13th gen HX processors as well as a line for Ultra books so I believe consumers will probably have no idea what they are buying seriously even I found describing these products to you in a way that is somewhat understandable extremely difficult and guys I'm just going to be honest here it took me days to write this script and I do this professionally Intel must simplify their product stack and take a page out of Apple's book with their M series finally as per everything in the tech space right now every bit of marketing to do with these new metake laptops had AI plastered everywhere which is annoying because none of my viewers have ever requested a laptop for better AI most just want laptops from Intel to stop having fan noise have decent battery life so I'd recommend Intel's marketing department focus on those aspects rather than attaching themselves to a bandwagon anyway after 5 minutes of trying to do Intel's marketing Department's job for them let's see how media Lake actually performs as I said I have two of these laptops MSI brand new and simply named Prestige 16 AI Evo b1m which we've affectionally named Jim Jim is powered by the new Intel Core Ultra 755h processor this processor is really the replacement to the i733 700h which is a very common processor found in high performance laptops that have decent cooling solutions and then we have one of our favorite laptops from 2023 the Asus embok 14 also powered by the same meteor L processor and stating the obvious but on YouTube sometimes it needs to be stated we only have a sample size of two laptops here with very early metor L firmware and drivers so expect the performance may be improved over time plus Jim our MSI Prestige is actually a manufacturer sample and far from a production version so please treat our results as directionally correct all laptops were run on their performance modes to show you what they are truly capable of for geekbench 6 which tests a variety of common performance tasks when comparing these media Lake laptops to the older Intel 13700 H which they replace it just isn't any faster in fact compared to that processor in the Inspiron 16 plus it's actually little slower and these new Intel metor laptops are completely destroyed by Apple's M3 Pro and Max processors but it did beat out AMD zen4 in multicore in this test let's now switch to cinebench r24 which tests how the laptop performs Under full load for the Zenbook 14 it is better in single core than our zook 14 from 2023 but for multi-core it's around the same and FYI please note our Zenbook from 2023 uses an older ryzen Zen 3 processor not the Zen 4 and it's a use series 1 not the higher powerered H series now Legion slim 7 does use the Zen 4 H series processor and it is a lot faster than the Zenbook 14 but it's about the same as the larger Prestige 16 gym and in this test the new Prestige 16 does handly beat out the Intel 13th gen H series laptops that it replaces but meteor lake is still way behind Apple's M3 in single core and way way way behind the MacBook Pro 16 with M3 Max in multicore now let's see how the processor performs under a long running system sustained workload to do this we ran cine bench on a loop for 10 minutes this looks very promising both medial Lake laptops were able to sustain their full performance over time please note though on cinebench r24 it's such a long-running benchmark that we just don't see big performance drops when compared to a single run so we did this test on the older cinebench R23 as well here you can see a much lower drop in performance over time versus their prior Generation all right let's take a look at the all important power draw here we can see that the max power draw of the meteor Lake zambuk 14 is very low compared to most laptops on this list which explains its poor performance compared to Jim Our medor Lake equipped MSI Prestige 16 but it isn't all that different to the pre generation zenok 14 and it's more wattage than hp's Pavilion plus4 with ryzen zen4 u and the MacBook Pro with the M3 Pro chip the prestige on the other hand draws a similar amount of power to last year's model and way less than the Inson 16 plus when we combine these results together that to see overall performance efficiency you can see that indeed Intel media lake is more efficient than its predecessor substantially so at lower wattage like in the Zenbook 14 this is in line with what we've seen from Intel AMD and apple processors in 2023 heck you can see it on our graph the lower wattage M4 U Series in the Pavilion plus is very efficient as is the MacBook Pro 14 with the M3 Pro let's now see how the improved efficiency of meteor Lake actually plays out when it comes to heat you actually feel from the chassis when the laptop is under full load the lower powered zenok 14 scores well and is an improvement from last year's model the MSI prestige on the other hand is a hot mess and way hotter than Apple's MacBook Pros the processor inside also gets crazy hot we measured 0° on our MSI Prestige with media Lake but there is a chance that this is just because our monitoring software isn't updated for these new processors so please take this result with a grain of salt fan noise when under Max load is significantly Less on both lap TOS than their pri models which is good but way more than a MacBook with M3 Pro looking at heat you feel the MSI with meteorite gets insanely hot I'd say MSI is just feeding this processor too much power for what this chassis can effectively call battery life of the zenok is a step back from last year's older AMD model unfortunately and even the prestige it isn't that good either it appears better than last year's model but that's because this new model has a larger battery and if you're wondering if either of these laptops performance drops when on battery power they don't finally the new Intel Arc integrated Graphics it's very good and a massive step forward in performance in times spy which is a common gaming Benchmark it's almost twice the performance of the pry generation and 2third of the performance of a dedicated RTX 3050 TI and that was a mid-range dedicated graphics from 2022 it also substantially beat out the radian 780m which is the integrated Graphics in the AMD Zen 4u processor in our HB pidion plus lastly I do want want to touch on the neural core performance although I don't have any benchmarks to show you I did see a demo of the common background blur effect that people use on Zoom Calles you know the one that hides your messy background I can confirm that I witnessed the general processor usage go way down and instead the neural processor was being utilized so with Hardware acceleration here I would expect that heaten fan noise when doing something like that will be reduced please note your software may take time to make use of this new hardware all right let's wrap media lake is a good step forward for Intel it is moderately more power efficient than their prior generation it gives you substantially better integrated graphics and a neural Processing Unit but it certainly isn't the huge step forward in terms of power efficiency that Intel really needed to compete with apple and comprehensively beat AMD and as for all laptop processors right now these meteor Lake laptops are more efficient at lower wattage which is what we saw with the Zenbook 14 vers The Prestige overall what I worry is that laptop manufacturers will feed these processors too much power to win benchmarks rather than use their modest efficiency improvements to reduce fan noise heat and extend battery life which was demonstrated today between the Zenbook and The Prestige and I just want to end with this I was a little surprised that the results we saw today just didn't seem to fully deliver on the results I would have expected from the change in the manufacturing process nor the results that Intel promised us that they would deliver well that's all for today folks make sure to subscribe to the channel and click the like button as we have a lot of reviews of metal Lake laptops coming and let's hope with new firmware updates the software updates the drivers we see more benefits from metor Lake in the future and if you're in the market for a laptop definitely check out our website as we clearly list all the laptops that we recommend and where to go to get the best deals on them till next time go to something awesome with your day and I will catch you later

Channel: Just Josh

Views: 81,588

Keywords: Meteor Lake, Intel 14th Gen, Intel 13th Gen, Intel vs AMD, Intel vs Apple, Mac vs PC, MacBook Pro, MacBook Pro M3, M3 Pro, M3 Max, Lenovo, Asus Zenbook 14, Asus Zenbook 14X, Intel, Intel Arc, Best Laptop, Best Laptop 2024, Best Laptop 2023, Best Laptop for Students, Best Laptop for Gaming, Best Laptop for Programming, Best Laptop for Gamers, Dell, Dell XPS, MSI Prestige, MSI, Apple vs Intel, AMD vs Intel, MacBook Pro M3 vs Intel, PC or Mac, MacBook Air, Laptop Review

Id: 7wZjhlYqZ2I

Length: 12min 51sec (771 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 14 2023