Intel Core Ultra “Meteor Lake PS” LGA 1851 & Core “Raptor Lake PS” LGA 1700 Socketed CPUs For Edge

Intel has announced its brand new Core Ultra "Meteor Lake PS" & Core "Raptor Lake PS" CPUs for Edge, utilizing the LGA 1851 & LGA 1700 socketed platforms.

We were expecting to see the new PS series launch soon and it looks like they are finally here. The chip was announced by Intel during Embedded World 2024 as its new Edge portfolio. The PS lineup of chips is made for emerging AI workloads and comes packed with Intel's Arc iGPUs and the Intel AI Boost NPUs, delivering great versatility on the LGA socketed platform.

The Intel PS CPU lineup is divided into two families, the higher-end Core Ultra lineup based on the Meteor Lake series and the Core lineup based on the Raptor Lake series.

Starting with the Intel PS Core Ultra family, what we are looking at is essentially the same Meteor Lake CPUs that launched for mobile a few months back but in LGA socketed flavors. These will be the only socketed Meteor Lake CPUs available as the DIY segment will be getting the Arrow Lake-S treatment.

Coming to the specifications, there are at least 9 SKUs mentioned which include four Meteor Lake PS 45W and five Meteor Lake PS 15W chips. The top chip is the Intel Core Ultra 7 (Series 1) 165HL & packs a total of 16 cores and 22 threads in a 6+8+2 (P/E/LP-E) configuration. The chip features 24 MB of L3 cache, a clock speed of up to 5.0 GHz, and can scale up to 65W. The Alchemist Arc iGPU is equipped with 8 Xe-cores of 128 execution units running at 2.3 GHz and supports up to 20 PCIe 4.0 lanes.

The most important part is that this is the first time that Intel is publicly confirming the LGA 1851 socket which will power its next-gen desktop CPU platforms such as Arrow Lake and beyond. The CPU socket is listed with support of up to DDR5-5600 memory, TBT4 IO, and has dimensions of 45 by 37.5mm. According to Intel, the Core Ultra "Meteor Lake PS" CPUs offer up to 5.02x faster GPU performance, 3.13x faster AI performance, and 3.85x lower power for AI and graphics workloads vs the previous generation.

Next up, we have the standard Intel Core SKUs featured under the Raptor Lake PS series. Now the difference here is that these aren't the standard Raptor Lake-S CPUs that we have seen for the LGA socket but rather the Raptor Lake-H series which ships with a higher number of GPU cores. Intel touts up to 2.57x faster graphics performance versus 13th Gen processors with its Raptor Lake PS lineup.

There are a total of 10 SKUs within the lineup, all configured for the LGA 1700 socket with support for 20 total PCIe lanes (CPU+PCH) and support for both DDR5-5200/DDR4-3200 memory solutions. The top-spec is the Core 7 160HL which features 14 cores in a 6+8 configuration with 20 threads & a boost clock of up to 5.20 GHz. This chip is outfitted with a total of 96 EUs which are clocked at up to 1.50 GHz and have similar TDP ratings of up to 65W.

Lastly, Intel is introducing its brand new embedded Atom Processors under the x7000RE series for the Edge computing platforms. These new chips are said to offer up to 1.49x faster single-threaded performance, 1.61x faster multi-threaded performance, and 9.83x higher performance in image/pic classification versus the older Atom Processors x6000RE series.

Although the initial roll out of the Intel PS CPU family will include the Raptor Lake PS and Atom CPU families, the Core Ultra "Meteor Lake PS" CPUs will only be available in the second quarter of 2024 so expect more information on their release soon.

In addition to all of these CPUs, Intel has also expanded the Arc GPUs to Edge with 6 SKUs which are essentially revised variants of the same chips that we have already seen on the market. Some of the GPUs such as the A750E and A580E still have the VRAM capacities and bandwidth listed under "In Planning" but we can expect them to be finalized before release.