Intel Core Ultra Series 1?

I was looking for some parts today and noticed a category that wasn’t there before, has this been announced yet?

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Ultra Series 1 would be the Intel 14th Gen / Meteror Lake “premium” line.

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woooooh something is incoming

Hype?

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14th gen Core is the high-power segment alongside the low and medium-power Core Ultra Series 1. So, Core Ultra Series 1 refers exclusively to Meteor Lake.

Hype for me, definitely

14th Gen specifically refers to Intel’s refreshed Raptor Lake CPUs. 14th Gen is exclusively desktop and HX series chips (both Intel and AMD use HX series to denote chips that were designed for desktop but have been repurposed into a soldered laptop form factor, compared to normal laptop CPUs they have much worse battery life, much higher cooling demands, much worse iGPUs, lack NPUs, and lack integrated USB4 controllers*).

* - IIRC Intel pairs (or at least offers) their laptop HX chips with a chipset that has a Thunderbolt controller, so lacking one integrated into the CPU isn’t a big deal.

Core Ultra Series 1 refers exclusively referring to Meteor Lake, which is a much more well rounded processor and would be more reasonable to fit within the cooling capabilities of the FW16.

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I don’t see that on the marketplace. I wonder if they changed it so it isn’t shown anymore. Definitely excited to see more for the FW16! I’m happy with the current processor but I really want to see a more powerful GPU.

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Yeah looks like they took it down :stuck_out_tongue:
Interestingly Intel U1 is roughly in line with the current 7x40 series in the Framework 16? Intriguing that they decided to update the processor, perhaps it can remove the annoyance of having non-homogeneous ports.

That might be the major benefit of going Intel. Would be cool for all 6 ports to be Thunderbolt 4 or 5.

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The Intel CPUs only support 4 Thunderbolt 4 ports, which would be a nice upgrade over the 2 USB4 ports on AMD but not all 6.

All 6 would require use of separate controllers independent of the CPU, which would incur extra cost and require PCIe lanes.

The CPU has 20 PCIe lanes, however 17 are already in use (8 for expansion bay, 4 for primary SSD, 4 for secondary SSD, 1 for Wi-Fi card) and Thunderbolt 4 controllers require 4 lanes (although they can usually share that between 2 ports). So 1 lane short, meaning Framework would either need to take lanes from something else (maybe 2 lane secondary SSD slot?) or introduce a PCIe switch to enable some things to share lanes (but that also introduces additional cost, complexity, and potentially battery drain).

I expect they will just have with 4 Thunderbolt 4 ports and 2 USB 3.2 ports.

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Unsure how they managed with the AMD 16 then considering it’s also limited to 20 PCIe lanes.
The M.2 may be bifurcated? Pity chipmakers are so tightfisted with PCIe lanes considering how little die area they take. Just looking back at Broadwell for instance.

Edit: Looks like you may be incorrect. Intel’s specifications list 28 lanes.

That would still be better than what we currently have. I think think the biggest issue currently is the restrictions on the video outputs. Only half the ports support it so one side of the laptop is currently different than the other.

They only use 17 lanes. That would only be exceeded if they were adding additional controllers.

Interesting, I had been going based on TechPowerUp’s diagram (attached below), but I guess that’s incorrect.

So they may be able to add additional controllers. If they do I hope they use an ASMedia ASM4242 controller rather than an Intel Thunderbolt controller (USB4v1 supports 40 Gbps of PCIe bandwidth, however so far only AMD CPU integrated controllers and ASMedia discrete controllers support that, Intel controllers are limited to 32 Gbps).

intel-mobile-mtl-h-u

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Could the extra eight lanes be for TB4?

The 8x pcie gen 5 would be for gpu/gpu bay

Thunderbolt controllers integrated directly into the CPU do not occupy PCIe lanes. Instead they have their own PCIe controllers.

The only things that occupy the listed PCIe lanes on the current FW16 are the expansion bay, SSDs, and Wi-Fi card. All of which total to 17 lanes. If Meteor Lake really has 28 lanes that means Framework has 11 lanes left to work with.

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So now we’ve seen the release for the Intel Core Ultra for the FW13. I’m hoping that the FW16 will get it as well, maybe released at a later date. I’m hoping it wasn’t accidentally uploaded under the FW16 when it was supposed to be under FW13. It certainly seems that way, but I’m still hoping to see more options for the FW16.

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