We had just completed an article on what the Ultra means in Intel Core Ultra, when one of our clients asked which CPU’s she should be buying now. Here was our response:
- PRICE:
Because companies don’t build computers anymore, they just buy them fully assembled from the lieks of HP, Dell and Lenovo, the cost of the CPU is buried in the completed product making the deltas very small. Also the rawe cost of the Intel Core Ultra CPU’s, if you were to buy them separately, is not much more than their new 14th generation Intel i-Series. - AI:
No one really knows how far the AI craze is going to go during the life of your next PC, but I can tell you AI is something I use every day when editing graphics, extracting text, making videos and searching systems. Most companies primary software vendor is Microsoft and they have spent many billions of dollars already to integrate AI into everything from Windows 11, to Microsoft Outlook to Microsoft Dynamics NAV. One thing is for sure, they are going to continue to push Copilot AI into as many software crevices as possible.
Given these two facts I wouldn’t consider purchasing a computer that was not running in Intel Core Ultra CPU.
Then the question gets down to which specific Intel Core Ultra CPU is the best for business and that really gets down to two questions:
- H or U?
there will certainly be more core ultra models in the future but today there’s just the H and the U series. If the computer is going to a power user running many complex software packages, or anyone that’s working with intense graphics needs (but can’t justify a separate video card), it’s probably worth the money to go to the H series but for most users, The U series will be far more than what they need today. - SPEED
Even Intel has seriously degraded their marketing efforts focused on gigahertz and megahertz, Because the cpu is so much more than just an old school single core, single type of core, bundle. If you view the benchmarks for these various processors you’ll notice very little difference in real world productivity between them. So buying a core Ultra CPU with a higher GHz is a good thing I wouldn’t spend much money on it.
The last thing to consider is that as we already mentioned companies mostly buy off the shelf desktops and laptops from the Big Three, Dell, HP and Lenovo, so you take what they have on offer. Trying to get a specific cpu is probably just going to be frustrating to you. You just need to decide if you want an H-Series or a U-Series Intel Core Ultra CPU.
We just bought our first corporate Dell Latitude 5450 with an Intel Core Ultra 5 125U for less than USD $1000, to give to a power user that has travels around the world. It would have been better to go to an H series cpu but they weren’t available and more importantly the battery life for this user was more important than having his gis mapping software refresh the screen in .3 seconds rather than .5 seconds.
We also decided that the Core Ultra 125U was the one that made sense because the cost difference between for the next step up was usd $200. Looking at the benchmarks it gave us only a tiny improvement to go to the 135U.
So that was it. For our clients, purchasing an Intel Core Ultra CPU based computer is going to boil down to what we can get at the time we are ordering, and which suffix on the CPU (H or U) the end user will need.
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