In a market that is constantly evolving with new products and even new players, the incumbent leader Intel has just announced two new P and U-series mobile processors. We spoke to Daniel Rogers, Senior Director, Mobile Product Marketing and Intel, to understand the new processors better. Edited excerpts from the interview:To get more intel news, you can visit shine news official website.
How is the P and U series different from the rest of Intel’s portfolio?
Daniel Rogers: The P series is a new segment for us somewhat. We have had a 28 Watt thin and light design point for a few years, but the reality in the market was that most systems were built to 15 Watts traditionally. So this generation, we did something a bit different, we actually offered two product lines, a P series at 28W, and a U series at 15W. We did this really to drive more performance. P series is similar to our H series and is derived from that fundamental architecture, but we have optimised that for lower power for thin and light designs, so we can bring an enthusiast-class or a high-end creator type performance into that thin and light form factor.
Is there a specific target audience and how you sort of are planning to target them?
Daniel Rogers: The most important audience for P-series is creators on the go, folks who are doing video editing, but still need a thin and light form factor. So maybe they are not looking for a 16-inch with discrete graphics, they are maybe looking for a 14-inch, maybe a system that has great battery life with a nice camera, but they still need some horsepower to get those video editing workflows and photo editing workflows done. So that’s probably the most direct use of a piece or the perfect customer for the P-series.
Daniel Rogers: Certainly with fans. In general, it’s somewhere around 12 Watts and below for fanless. So here we are talking 20 to 28 Watts, sometimes 35 Watts. But the thermals are well managed so they won’t be extraordinarily loud or with poor skin temperatures. Like with our Evo program we put a lot of work in with our partners to make sure these are well-built, and they are still meeting the promise of a thin and light.
How are the two series different from each other?
Daniel Rogers: The P series starts with 14 cores. So it’s 14 cores and higher power. Our U series is more tailored. So it’s 10 cores, two performance cores and eight efficient cores and lower power. Other than that, at the technology level, they are very similar. The IO is similar. The breakouts are similar.
In the case of architecture, how are these mobile processors different from the other processors that you have?
Daniel Rogers: So we started with our desktop, which is an LGA socket, pins out, so end users can populate it. And so that’s a 16 core — eight performance, eight efficient cores. Then we moved on to our H Series product line or Halo mobile product line, generally paired with discrete graphics. So that’s just a one-click lower — 14 core with six performance cores and eight efficient cores. It has extra IO to attach to the discrete graphics. Then the mobile, we call it thin and light P series and U series, it goes all the way down to 9 Watts in very small package, very low power optimised for battery life, but of course, still great performance.
Daniel Rogers: Yeah, we are seeing quite a few new designs. There will be some sort of experimentation in the market, although P-series does sit in between our H series and U series. It is a value proposition, and it is delivering a level of performance that has not been offered previously.
Daniel Rogers: In 10th Gen, we started with, our VNI instructions, which has some nice speed-ups for some AI workloads and in 11th Gen, or Tiger Lake, we added our DB4A, which is another nice instruction on the GT side which gives an important acceleration in the like ML performance. These are accessed through the Intel one API framework. Many applications are using that today, like Gigapixel photo for example. Aside from that, it is essentially a similar implementation to 11th Gen. With our upcoming generation next year, we are bringing some specific IPs for AI.
Daniel Rogers: It is an exciting time in the silicon industry. Certainly, it’s an exciting time in the PC and other operating systems space as well. It’s a competitive world and I sort of love it. But we are very proud of what we brought with the 12th Gen and you will notice this in our launch materials where we share some of those performance comparisons. You can see how we sort of stack up this generation.