Intel’s Core Ultra desktop CPUs keep AI simple to make gamers happy [Video]

Intel’s new Arrow Lake architecture, aka the Core Ultra 200S series, brings AI capabilities onto Intel desktops. But the chip doesn’t use the Copilot+ capabilities of Intel’s mobile Lunar Lake chip — its designers used the older NPU found on Meteor Lake instead.

For now, this means that if you buy an Arrow Lake chip, you won’t be able to use it with some of the new AI enhancements found within Windows 11’s 2024 Update, like generative AI and the controversial Recall function. Arrow Lake’s optimized NPU 3 only provides 13 TOPS, while Microsoft set 40 TOPS as the bar for Copilot+ status. Intel still plans to ship more than 40 million AI PCs in 2024, using the vaguer “AI PC” definition that accompanied the launch of Meteor Lake.

Arrow Lake is the not the first desktop PC architecture to include an NPU for AI. Last January, AMD announced the Ryzen 8000 series of desktop processorswith an NPU capable …