Citrix VDI Gets Intel Low-power Island E-core Awareness and HDX Super Resolution

Citrix announced that the Citrix VDI (virtual desktop) platform has been updated with greater awareness of Intel Hybrid core architecture, particularly for processors with low-power island E-cores (LPE cores). The company also announced that Citrix will leverage Intel Video Processing Library to implement a display stream super resolution feature that should improve image-quality in virtual desktop sessions. Since Citrix is essentially “GeForce NOW for work,” the client’s side of the application has a tiny compute footprint, of decoding the display stream from the server, and conveying user inputs to it. The new LPE-core awareness lets Citrix Desktop confine its workload to the low-power island, allowing the processor to clock-gate, or even power-gate the main CPU complex, significantly improving battery life on commercial notebooks handed out by businesses to their employees.

First-party testing by Citrix shows that LPE-core awareness is found to reduce power consumption by up to 25% on commercial notebooks. For administrators, the update requires no IT policy changes, simply deploy the latest version of Citrix desktop across clients, and the application will automatically detect and work with processors featuring low-power island E-cores. LPE cores were introduced by Core Ultra “Meteor Lake” mobile processors. These got a major update in significance with Core Ultra 200V “Lunar Lake,” where all “Skymont” E-cores of the chip are located in the low-power island of the SoC tile, separate from the Compute complex. The latest Core Ultra 300 “Panther Lake” builds on LPE core concept with up to 4 “Darkmont” LPE cores.