Intel’s upcoming Meteor Lake processors will mean better battery life for laptops that have these CPUs inside, thanks to Team Blue bringing the power of AI to power management with these mobile chips.
PC world reports that Intel is heavily focused on AI not only with Meteor Lake in terms of having a VPU on the chips (a visual processing unit to help power AI workloads), but that AI it also “heavily” affects the power states of the notebooks here.
Specifically, Intel revealed at the recent Hot Chips conference that Meteor Lake, as well as its future best CPUs, will use AI to make some crucial decisions about when exactly to switch between high-power (performance) and low-power states. (inactivity) .
As Intel explained during the Hot Chips conference, the trick is in how the CPU can switch between states as efficiently as possible, in what Team Blue calls Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (or DVFS in brief).
DVFS decision making was revamped a long time ago with Skylake processors (in 2015), when Intel introduced Speed Shift, a technology that intelligently switched between high and low power CPU states based on standardized estimates for tasks (like opening a web page, for example, or any common workload).
Now, Intel has used artificial intelligence so that this algorithm can, in the given example, predict how the user will open the web page, use it, then close it and move on.
As PC World clarifies, the difference lies instead in a more rough estimate of how these common tasks work and how to optimize energy consumption accordingly, the algorithm has learned itself in more depth to refine the transition to the result in the lowest consumption energetic.
Analysis: it’s not just about energy savings, but also about responsiveness
They might seem like trivial details, but the overall effect could be very considerable. Add up all those small energy savings on every single activity you do in a laptop session – a lot – and your battery will (hopefully) last appreciably longer.
Efraim Rotem, an Intel Fellow and head of client SoC architecture at the company’s Design Engineering Group, believes that moving to Meteor Lake could save 15% more energy than before (energy is work over time, divided by the power used, rather than just a simple energy consumption).
Not to mention, this also helps fine-tune the system’s responsiveness in day-to-day tasks. Rotem estimates that in this regard, Meteor Lake introduces up to a 35% improvement in responsiveness, no less, making these laptops more likely to rank higher in our best laptops list.
Note that this depends on “up to” and also that the AI won’t apply to everything you do on your laptop. So far, the AI has only been trained on certain scenarios and won’t train based on how you use your computer as an individual, although such customization is entirely possible as an avenue for the future. Really exciting times.
We’ll get all the details when the Meteor Lake processors launch at next month’s Intel Innovation event, and we’ll definitely hear more about AI then.
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