Intel expands Core Ultra AI chips amidst market competition

Intel has expanded its Core Ultra AI chips lineup, a critical response to competitive products from AMD and Qualcomm.

On Monday, the chipmaker launched the Core Ultra 200HX and H series for mobile PCs used by gamers and graphic designers. The latest releases, unveiled at this week's CES conference in Las Vegas, came four months after the company released the Intel Core Ultra 200V series for business AI PCs and three months after the Core Ultra 9 for running AI at the edge. The 200V series includes the vPro platform for security and remote management.

The chips alone are unlikely to quicken enterprise adoption of AI PCs. However, Intel needed to increase the lineup to counter competing products within AMD's Ryzen AI series and Qualcomm's Snapdragon X series.

"Without these new chips, they would have fallen far behind the others in the AI PC category," said Jack Gold, principal analyst at J. Gold Associates. "It was also critical for Intel to have an AI chip in its vPro line where many enterprises buy machines."

Over the last several years, AMD has taken PC market share from Intel. Qualcomm offers Arm-based processors to Intel and AMD's x86 chips. Qualcomm has yet to penetrate the enterprise market significantly because not all business software is compatible with Arm, which provides longer battery life for mobile computing.

As of the end of the third quarter of 2024, AI had not increased sales in the PC market. Shipments globally dipped 2.4%, with a large portion of the demand concentrated on entry-level PCs, IDC reported. PCs with AI capabilities constitute the premium side of the market.

IDC said it expects consumers to wait until there's software that gives them a compelling reason to spend more on a computer to run AI. Consumer-attracting capabilities are unlikely to start having an impact well into 2026, the analyst firm said.

The enterprise market is different. A couple of factors will increase AI PC sales to companies, analysts said. First, PCs that enterprises bought during the pandemic are nearing their end of life, so businesses are likely to replace them with AI PCs to future-proof their purchases. Companies typically hold onto PCs for four or five years before buying new ones.

Also, Microsoft plans to stop supporting Windows 10 in October, driving many enterprises to upgrade to Windows 11. The latest operating system requires a more powerful PC than Windows 10.

AI capabilities built into products by enterprise software makers such as Microsoft, Salesforce and SAP will also drive AI PC sales. Still, companies will need time to incorporate security and data protection into the new features.

"This is the classic case of hardware always being ahead of software," said Bob O'Donnell, chief analyst at Technalysis Research.

Key features in the Core Ultra 200HX and 200H series include 24 and 16 computing cores, respectively. The 200H has Intel's Arc graphics and X Matrix Extensions for AI acceleration to provide better gaming performance than the company's previous H-series processors. The H platform, including CPU, GPU and neural processing unit (NPU), can perform up to 99 trillion operations per second (TOPS).

The 200HX series has a built-in NPU that performs 13 TOPS for AI and has as many as 48 total PCIe lanes, including PCIe 4.0 and 5.0, for connecting discrete GPUs and storage. The chip provides overclocking options to tune performance for gaming.

The Core Ultra 9 has a better AI inference engine than previous generations for common machine vision tasks, such as facial recognition, object tracking in video frames, and image classification and restoration. Core Ultra 9 also performs better for running the small language model versions of Llama 3 and Stable Diffusion 1.5 at the edge, according to Intel.

Computer makers will release PCs powered by the Core Ultra 200H series starting in February, Intel said. PCs with the Core Ultra 200HX series will be available later in the first half of the year.

Intel expects to become much stronger in the AI market with the release of its third-generation Core Ultra mobile processors, codenamed Panther Lake. The processor, which Intel expects to launch in mid-2025, features a new architecture built on Intel's advanced 18A manufacturing process.

Antone Gonsalves is an editor at large for Informa TechTarget, reporting on industry trends critical to enterprise tech buyers. He has worked in tech journalism for 25 years and is based in San Francisco. Have a news tip? Please drop him an email.