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Comment by DrammBA | Hacker News Reader

> Today at CES, Intel unveiled Intel Core Ultra Series 3 processors, the first AI PC platform built on Intel 18A process technology that was designed and manufactured in the United States. Powering over 200 designs from leading, global partners, Series 3 will be the most broadly adopted and globally available AI PC platform Intel has ever delivered.

What in the world is this disaster of an opening paragraph? From the weird "AI PC platform" (not sure what that is) to the "will be the most broadly adopted and globally available AI PC platform" (is that a promise? a prediction? a threat?).

And you just gotta love the processor names "Intel Core Ultra Series 3 Mobile X9/X7"

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I think I have given up on chip naming. I honestly can't tell anymore there are so many modifiers on the names these days. I assume 9 is better than 7 right? Right?

> I assume 9 is better than 7 right? Right?

Oh, the number of times I’ve heard someone assume their five- or ten-year-old machine must be powerful because it’s an i7… no, the i3-14100 (released two years ago) is uniformly significantly superior to the i7-9700 (released five years before that), and only falls behind the i9-9900 in multithreaded performance.

Within the same product family and generation, I expect 9 is better than 7, but honestly it wouldn’t surprise me to find counterexamples.

>>Within the same product family and generation, I expect 9 is better than 7

Ah the good old Dell laptop engineering, where the i9 is better on paper, but in reality it throttles within 5 seconds of starting any significant load and the cpu nerfs itself below even i5 performance. Classic Dell move.

Apple had the same problem before they launched the M1. Unless your workloads are extremely bursty the i9 MacBook is almost guaranteed to be slower than the base i7.

The latest iPhone base model performs better than the iPhone Air despite the latter having a Pro chip, because that Pro is so badly throttled due to the device form factor.

Even thier ultra efficent silicon didn't fully solve this; a 16" M4 Pro often outperforms a 14" M4 Max stuck throttling.

Are they throttling with the fan off? Because I don't recall ever hearing the fan on my M3 Max 14" (granted no heavy deliberate computational beyond regular dev work).

No this shows up when you really fully load them and the fans can't keep up. Most people never do, but then why buy the Max?

AFAIK it’s only something that happens under sustained heavy load. The 14” Max should still outperform the Pro for shorter tasks but I’d reckon few people buy the most expensive machine for such use cases.

Personally I think that Apple should not even be selling the 14” Max when it has this defect.

I can’t comment on that.

But at least you always know an A7 is better than an A6 or an A4. The M4 is better than the M3 and M1.

The suffixes make it more complicated, but at least within a suffix group the rule still holds.

But if you buy a Mac Studio today, you have to choose a M4 Max or a much faster M3 Ultra.

The Ultra isn’t always faster.

Apple’s spotty record on the Ultras (they haven’t released one every generation) makes things harder for comparisons without looking at benchmarks.

First time I’m hearing this. Do you have any sources on this?

I still have the i9 macbook pro and its a dog for sure throttles massively

Within the same family and generation, I don’t think this should happen any more. But especially in the past, some laptops were configurable with processors of different generations or families (M, Q, QM, U, so many possibilities) so that the i7 option might have worse real-world performance than the i5 (due to more slower cores).

It's been a cooling problem on a lot of i9 laptops... the CPU will hit thermal peaks, then throttle down, this has an incredibly janky feel as a user... then it spins back up, and down... the performance curves just wacky in general.

Today is almost worse, as the thermal limits will be set entirely different between laptop vendors on the same chips, so you can't even have apples to apples performance expectations from different vendors.

Same for the later generation Intel Macbook Pros... The i9 was so bad, and the throttling made it practically unusable for me. If it weren't a work issued laptop, I'd have either returned it, or at least under-volted and under-clocked it so it didn't hiccup every time I did anything at all.

I had an X1 Carbon like this, only it'd crash for no apparent reason. The internet consensus that Lenovo wouldn't own up to was that the i7 CPUs were overpowered for the cooling, so your best bet is either underthrottling them or getting an i5.

Yeah, putting an i9 in any laptop that's not an XL gaming rig with big fans is very nearly always a waste of money (there might exist a few rare exceptions for some oddball workloads). Manufacturers selling i9s in thin & light laptops at an ultra price premium may fall just short of the legal definition of fraud but it's as unconscionable as snake-oil audiophile companies selling $500 USB cables.

Tbf 2 jobs ago I had a Dell enterprise workstation laptop, an absolute behemoth of a thing, it was like 3.5kg, it was the thicker variant of the two available with extra cooling, specifically sold to companies like ours needing that extra firepower, and it had a 20 core i9, 128GB of DDR5 CAMM ram, and a 3080Ti - I think the market price of that thing was around £14k, it was insane. And it had exactly that kind of behaviour I described - I would start compiling something in Visual Studio, I would briefly see all cores jump to 4GHz and then immediately throttle down to 1.2GHz, to a point where the entire laptop was unresponsive while the compilation was ongoing. It was a joke of a machine - I think that's more of a fraud than what you described, because companies like ours were literally buying hundreds of these from Dell and they were literally unsuitable for their advertised use.

(to add insult to the injury - that 3080Ti was literally pointless as the second you started playing any game the entire system would throttle so hard you had extreme stuttering in any game, it was like driving a lamborghini with a 5 second fuel reserve. And given that I worked at a games studio that was kinda an essential feature).

That's still assigning too much significance to the "i9" naming. Sometimes, the only difference between the i9 part and the top i7 part was something like 200MHz of single-core boost frequency, with the core counts and cache sizes and maximum power limit all being equal. So quite often, the i7 has stood to gain just as much from a higher-power form factor as the i9.

A machine learning model can place a CPU on the versioning manifold but I'm not confident that it could translate it to human speech in a way that was significantly more useful than what we have now.

At best, 14700KF-Intel+AMD might yield relevant results.

AI PC has been in the buzz for more than 2 years now (despite itself being a near useless concept), and intel has like 75% marketshare for laptop. Both of those are well with in norm for an intel marketing piece.

It’s not really meant for consumer. Who would even visit newsroom.intel.com?

Apparently it’s been a thing for a while:

What is an AI PC? ('Look, Ma! No Cloud!')

An AI PC has a CPU, a GPU and an NPU, each with specific AI acceleration capabilities. An NPU, or neural processing unit, is a specialized accelerator that handles artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) tasks right on your PC instead of sending data to be processed in the cloud. https://newsroom.intel.com/artificial-intelligence/what-is-a...

It'd be interesting to see some market survey data showing the number of AI laptops sold & the number of users that actively use the acceleration capabilities for any task, even once.

I'm not sure I've ever heard of a single task that comes built into the system and uses the NPU.

Remove background from an image. Summarize some text. OCR to select text or click links in a screenshot. Relighting and centering you in your webcam. Semantic search for images and files.

A lot of that is in the first party Mac and Windows apps.

Selecting text in a photo is a game changer. I love it.

Wasn’t built in OCR an amazing feature?

We probably could have done it years earlier. But when it showed up… wow.

CES stands for Consumer Electronics Show last I checked.

Laptop names are even worse:

> Are ZBooks good or do I want an OmniBook or ProBook? Within ZBook, is Ultra or Fury better? Do I want a G1a or a G1i? Oh you sell ZBook Firefly G11, I liked that TV show, is that one good?

https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2025/11/29/bikes...

TIL Geohot pretty much want the exact same thing in a laptop. Basically a Macbook Pro running Linux.

And that root of all that shit lies Apple and the ‘book’ suffix.

Apple is very consistent. You have the MacBook Air (lighter, more portable variant) and the MacBook Pro (more expensive and powerful variant). They don’t mess around with model numbers.

Apple is so "consistent" the way to know which kind of an Air or Pro it is, is to find the tiny print on the bottom that's a jumble of letters like "MGNE3" and google it.

And depending on what you're trying to use it for, you need to map it to a string like "MacBookAir10,1" or "A2337" or "Macbook Air Late 2022".

Oh also the Macbook Air (2020) is a different processor architecture than Macbook Air (2020).

The canonical way if you need a version number is the "about this Mac" dialog (here it says Mac Studio 2022).

If you need to be technical, System Information says Mac13,1 and these identifiers have been extremely consistent for about 30 years.

Your product number encodes much more information than that, and about the only time when it is actually required is to see whether it is eligible for a recall.

> Oh also the Macbook Air (2020) is a different processor architecture than Macbook Air (2020).

Right, except that one is MacBook Air (retina, 2020), Macbookair9,1, and the other is MacBook Air (M1, 2020), MacBookAir10,1. It happens occasionally, but the fact that you had to go back 5 years to a period in which the lineup underwent a double transition speaks volume.

> Apple is very consistent. You have the MacBook Air (lighter, more portable variant) and the MacBook Pro (more expensive and powerful variant).

What about the iBook? That wasn’t tidy. Ebooks or laptops?

Or the iPhone 9? That didn’t exist.

Or MacOS? Versioning got a bit weird after 10.9, due the X thing.

They do mess around with model numbers and have just done it again with the change to year numbers. I don’t particularly care but they aren’t all clean and pure.

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/05/28/gurman-version-...

> What about the iBook? That wasn’t tidy. Ebooks or laptops?

Back then, there were iBooks (entry-level) and PowerBooks (professional, high performance and expensive). There had been PowerBooks since way back in 1991, well before any ebook reader. I am not sure what your gripe is.

> Or the iPhone 9? That didn’t exist.

There’s a hole in the series. In what way is it a problem, and how on earth is it similar to the situation described in the parent?

> Or MacOS? Versioning got a bit weird after 10.9, due the X thing.

It never got weird. After 10.9.5 came 10.10.0. Version numbers are not decimals.

Seriously, do you have a point apart from "Apple bad"?

You were saying that Apple is very consistent. I’m pointing out they aren’t particularly.

> It never got weird. After 10.9.5 came 10.10.0. Version numbers are not decimals.

They turned one of the numbers into a letter then started numbering again.

There was Mac OS 9, then Mac OS X. That got incremented up past 10.

You say they don’t mess around with model numbers. Yes they do, with software and hardware.

I like using them both.

> They turned one of the numbers into a letter then started numbering again.

They did not. It has been MacOS X 10.0 through macOS 10.15. In never was X.1 or anything like that.

Right. MacOS X was the marketing name. But it was pronounced 10, just a stylization with Roman numerals.

The version number the OS reported always said 10.whatever. Exactly as you said.

Yes, and you did sound silly when saying it out loud the official way (OS ten ten ten was a famous one, for Yosemite).

I stand corrected. I thought the X(10) was part of the version number, not a prefix that got added.

I’m not sure I hear people call MacOS X 10.10 “ten ten ten”. I think I remember them calling it “ten ten” verbally.

So you’d say “MacOS ten ten”.

At least that’s what I’m used to, it is entirely possible that’s what other people said and you would write it that way. No one wrote “MacOS X.10” or “MacOS X .10” but they would write “MacOS X 10.10”.

So yeah it’s all a bit of a mess. There’s a reason people often use the name of the release, like Snow Leopard or Tahoe, instead of the number numbers.

It was a response to you specifically calling out the book suffix.

And what was unclear iBook VS PowerBook?

The iBook store.

Sorry, I thought you were saying that they don’t use model numbers at all.

I think you were actually saying that they don’t just them for laptops.

"iBook" referred to a laptop from 1999 to 2006. "iBooks" referred to the eBook reader app and store from 2010 to 2019. I'll grant that there is some possibility for confusion, but only if the context of the conversation spans multiple decades but doesn't make it clear whether you're talking about hardware or software.

I got a MacBook. No, not an air or pro, just MacBook.

Back when there were MacBooks, it was MacBook (standard model), MacBook Air (lighter variant), and MacBook Pro (more expensive, high-performance variant). Sure, 3 is more complicated than 2, but come on.

If you really want to complain, you can go back to the first unibody MacBook, which did not fit that pattern, or the interim period when high-DPI displays were being rolled out progressively, but let’s be serious. The fact is that even at the worst of times their range could be described in 2 sentences. Now, try to do that for any other computer brand. To my knowledge, he only other with an understandable lineup was Microsoft, before they lost interest.

> The fact is that even at the worst of times their range could be described in 2 sentences.

It’s a good time to buy one. They are all good.

It would be interesting to know how many SKUs are hidden behind the simple purchase interface on their site. With the various storage and colour options, it must be over 30.

Loads, I assume. But those are things like "MacBook Pro M1 Max with a 1TB SSD and a matte screen coating" versus "MacBook Pro M1 with a 256GB SSD and a standard screen". The granularity of say Dell’s product numbers is not enough for that either, and you still need a long product number when searching their knowledge base.

waiting for a MacBook Vapour

Apple did not invent the -book suffix for model names of notebook computers.

Thanks - I didn’t know that.

Looks like it was Notebook in 1982 and Dynabook after that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notebook_computer

Intel marketing isn’t the best but I am struggling to understand what issue you’re taking with this.

It’s an AI PC platform. It can do AI. It has an NPU and integrated GPU. That’s pretty straightforward. Competitors include Apple silicon and AMD Ryzen AI.

They’re predicting it’ll sell well, and they have a huge distribution network with a large number of partner products launching. Basically they’re saying every laptop and similar device manufacturer out there is going to stuff these chips in their systems. I think they just have some well-placed confidence in the laptop segment, because it’s supposed to combine the strong efficiency of the 200 series with the kind of strong performance that can keep up with or exceed competition from AMD’s current laptop product lineup.

Their naming sucks but nobody’s really a saint on that.

i cant believe we're still putting NPUs into new designs.

silicon taken up that couldve been used for a few more compute units on the GPU, which is often faster at inference anyway and way more useful/flexible/programmable/documented.

You can thank Microsoft for that. Intel architects in fact did not want to waste area on an NPU. That caused Microsoft to launch their AI-whatever branded PCs with Qualcomm who were happy to throw in whatever Microsoft wanted to get to be the launch partner. After than Intel had to follow suit to make Microsoft happy.

That doesn’t explain why Apple “wastes” die area on their NPU.

The thing is, when you get an Apple product and you take a picture, those devices are performing ML tasks while sipping battery life.

Microsoft maybe shouldn’t be chasing Apple especially since they don’t actually have any marketshare in tablets or phones, but I see where they’re getting at: they are probably tired of their OS living on devices that get half the battery life of their main competition.

And here’s the thing, Qualcomm’s solution blows Intel out of the water. The only reason not to use it is because Microsoft can’t provide the level of architecture transition that Apple does. Apple can get 100% of their users to switch architecture in about 7 years whenever they want.

Guess they're following Apple here whose NPUs get all the support possible, as far as I can tell.

Bingo. Maybe Microsoft shouldn’t even be chasing them but I think they have a point to try and stay competitive. They can’t just have their OS getting half the battery life of their main competitor.

When you use an Apple device, it’s performing ML tasks while barely using any battery life. That’s the whole point of the NPU. It’s not there to outperform the GPU.

NPUs aren't designed to be "faster", they are designed to have better perf/power ratios.

Every modern chip needs some percentage dedicated to dark silicon. There is no cheating the thermal reality. You could add more compute units in the GPU, but you then have to make up for it somewhere else. It’s a balancing act.

The Core Ultra lineup is supposed to be low-power, low-heat, right? If you want more compute power, pick something from a different product series.

> Every modern chip needs some percentage dedicated to dark silicon. There is no cheating the thermal reality. You could add more compute units in the GPU, but you then have to make up for it somewhere else. It’s a balancing act.

I think that "dark silicon" mentality is mostly lingering trauma from when the industry first hit a wall with the end of Dennard scaling. These days, it's quite clear that you can have a chip that's more or less fully utilized, certainly with no "dark" blocks that are as large as a NPU. You just need to have the ability to run the chip at lower clock speeds to stay within power and thermal constraints—something that was not well-developed in 2005's processors. For the kind of parallel compute that GPUs and NPUs tackle, adding more cores but running them at lower clock speeds and lower voltages usually does result in better efficiency in practice.

The real answer to the GPU vs NPU question isn't that the GPU couldn't grow, but that the NPU has a drastically different architecture making very different power vs performance tradeoffs that theoretically give it a niche of use cases where the NPU is a better choice than the GPU for some inference tasks.

It's a disaster along with the title. There isn't a lot of clear information.

It means they did cost cutting on Lunar Lake and are excited to sell a lot of them at similar or higher prices.

> cost cutting on Lunar Lake

It's... the launch vehicle for a new process. Literally the opposite of "cost cutting", they went through the trouble of tooling up a whole fab over multiple years to do this.

Will 18A beat TSMC and save the company? We don't know. But they put down a huge bet that it would, and this is the hand that got dealt. It's important, not something to be dismissed.

Lunar Lake integrated DRAM on the package, which was faster and more power efficient, this reverts that. They also replaced part of the chip from being sourced from TSMC to from themselves. And if their foundry is competitive, they should be shaking other foundry customers down the way TSMC is.

If they have actually mostly caught up to TSMC, props, but also, I wish they hadn't given up on EUV for so long. Instead they decided to ship chips overclocked so high they burn out in months.

> Lunar Lake integrated DRAM on the package, which was faster and more power efficient, this reverts that.

On package memory is slightly more power efficient but it isnt any faster, it still uses industry standard LPDDR. And Panther Lake supports faster LPDDR than Lunar Lake, so its definitely not a regression.

I don't see how any of that substantiates "Panther Lake and 18A are just cost cutting efforts vs. Lunar Lake". It mostly just sounds like another boring platform flame.

I'll let Intel speak for themselves here:

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/lunar-lakes-...

Again, you're talking about the design of Panther Lake, the CPU IC. No one cares, it's a CPU. The news here is the launch of the Intel 18A semiconductor process and the discussion as to if and how it narrows or closes the gap with TSMC.

Trying to play this news off as "only cost cutting" is, to be blunt, insane. That's not what's happening at all.

I'm not GP, but I think that it really doesn't matter if Intel is able to sell this process to other companies. But if they're only producing their own chips on it, that's quite a valid criticism.

And for the fourth time, it may be a valid "criticism" in the sense of "Does Intel Suck or Rule?". It does not validate the idea that this product release, which introduces the most competitive process from this company in over a decade, is merely a "cost reduction" change.

It's only as exciting as a cost reduction because they're playing catch-up by trying to not need to outsource their highest performance silicon. Let me know when Intel gets perf/watt to be high enough to be of interest to Apple, gamers, or anyone who isn't just buying a basic PC because their old one died, or an Intel server because that's what they've always had.

Every single performance figure in TFA is compared to their own older generations, not to competitors.

Cost cutting? 18a probably has more invested in it then every other process Intel has ever produced combined.

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