Intel announced its latest processors, the Intel Core Ultra series, on Tuesday during the Intel Innovation keynote, which it said will usher in the era of the “AI PC” when the chip hits the market later this year.
The new Intel processors, codenamed Meteor Lake, will be the company’s first chips for the consumer market with a dedicated neural processing unit (NPU), which will power AI-driven workloads for consumers, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said during the opening speech from Intel. the Intel Innovation conference in San Jose, California. Gelsinger also confirmed that the new processors will be launched on December 14 this year.
“AI will fundamentally transform, reshape and restructure the PC experience – unleashing personal productivity and creativity through the power of cloud-PC collaboration,” he said. “We are ushering in a new era of the AI PC.”
Along with the NPU and what Intel claims will be impressive “energy-efficient performance” thanks to the advanced 7nm Intel 4 process technology, Intel’s new chip series will offer an enhanced integrated GPU powered by the Intel Arc graphics architecture. While we haven’t seen the chips in person yet, the improved GPU alone could help make these the best processors of 2023, especially for more budget-friendly systems that don’t require a dedicated graphics card.
The Core Ultra is the company’s first consumer CPU with a multi-chiplet module (MCM) design. This design uses two or more silicon wafers – containing the transistors that power a computer, called dies – connected at a microscopic level to allow for more flexible chip development than is possible with a single slab of monolithic silicon that companies have used in chip production. Past.
The MCM design will be supported by Intel’s Foveros packaging technology, the same chip-bonding technology used in the ill-fated Lakefield chip that powered some low-power mobile devices that were poorly received, and thus soon into End of Life.
While there were many issues with the Lakefield chip other than the Foveros packaging that kept it from being successful, the Core Ultra chips represent a major design shift for Intel’s processors, even bigger than the move to a hybrid core architecture with Intel Alder Lake back. in 2022, so Intel is putting a lot of faith in this technology to enable its future chip development.
Bringing AI applications to the personal computer
A key part of this year’s Intel Innovations conference is an update to Intel’s distribution of the OpenVINO AI toolkit, which will provide developers with a common language to use when building AI applications and will leverage the new Intel hardware.
Intel’s latest 2023.1 version of the toolkit has been optimized to use the NPU in the Intel Core Ultra processor, which Intel and developers hope will in turn make the practical development of AI applications for PCs with Core Ultra chips both easier and more attractive to both developers and consumers.
“We worked with Intel teams to develop a series of Acer AI applications to take advantage of the Intel Core Ultra platform,” said Jerry Kao, Chief Operating Officer of Acer during the keynote. “Developing with the OpenVINO toolkit and co-developed AI libraries to bring the hardware to life.”
I immediately think of generative AI and multimedia usage, as well as device personalization, settings, and other applications that have already appeared on Windows PCs in recent years but don’t have specialized hardware to power them.
Based on Apple’s playbook
Although the Intel Core Ultra is the first chip from Team Blue to introduce an NPU, it is not the first processor on the market to do so. That honor would go to Apple, which introduced a neural engine in its A11 Bionic chip in 2017, and later in its Apple M1 chip in 2020.
These chips, especially on mobile devices, have contributed to some notable developments in photography and video on the best iPhones, but there hasn’t really been a breakthrough ‘killer app’ for these consumer chips like the best graphics cards to do that. from Nvidia, as well as its more industrial AI hardware, has powered the generative AI revolution behind ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion and others.
Still, Intel getting into the NPU game is a smart move, and with the OpenVINO toolkit, there’s a lot of incentive for the broad base of developers who code for Intel hardware to find new and practical applications for this NPU. In any case, it’s something really new from Intel, so it’ll be exciting to see how it all plays out once we get our hands on the chips.