While the 9000 series looks decent, I honestly think Intel has a really interesting platform to build off of with the core ultra chips. It feels like Intel course correcting with poor decisions made for the 13th and 14th gen chips. Wendel from Level1 techs made a really good video about the good things Intel put into the chips while also highlighting some of the bad things, things like a built-in NPU and how they’re going to use that to pull in profiles for applications and games with ML, or the fact that performance variance occurs between chipset makers more often with the core ultra. It’s basically a step forwards in tech but a step backwards in price/performance.
Work at a tech store; the technicians that build the PCs for customers recently tried building with the new Core Ultra 7 256K. Two processors were dead or unstable right out of thr box. Tried with known good RAM, two different cpus on two different motherboards. It seems that Intel hasn’t really fixed their stability issue, which should be their first concern.
