Intel Announces a Mission to "Bring AI Everywhere," Aims to "Usher in the Age of the AI PC"

Chip-making giant Intel has declared a mission to "bring AI everywhere," unveiling a raft of products designed to accelerate on-device machine learning and artificial intelligence (ML and AI) workloads — including a mobile-centric processor claimed to represent the company's "largest architectural shift in 40 years" and a high-performance accelerator launching next year.

“AI innovation is poised to raise the digital economy’s impact up to as much as one-third of global gross domestic product," Intel chief executive officer Pat Gelsinger claims in support of the company's new focus. "Intel is developing the technologies and solutions that empower customers to seamlessly integrate and effectively run AI in all their applications — in the cloud and, increasingly, locally at the PC and edge, where data is generated and used."

"Intel is on a mission to bring AI everywhere through exceptionally engineered platforms, secure solutions, and support for open ecosystems," Gelsinger continues. "Our AI portfolio gets even stronger with today’s launch of Intel Core Ultra ushering in the age of the AI PC and AI-accelerated 5th Gen Xeon for the enterprise."

The Intel Core Ultra is a mobile-centric processor design, known under the codename Meteor Lake, which the company simultaneously describes as its "largest architecture shift in 40 years" and "the largest transformation of the PC experience in 20 years, since the Intel Centrino." The chip family is designed to usher in what Intel calls "the AI PC generation," offering the company's first client-centric on-chip neural processing unit (NPU) coprocessor, dubbed Intel AI Boost, for on-device AI and ML workloads, plus claimed 2.5x boost in energy efficiency over the company's last-generation parts.

Intel has big predictions for the future of client computing, too: Intel's Michelle Johnston Holthaus, executive vice president and general manager of the company's client computing group, says that "By 2028, AI PCs will comprise 80 percent of the PC market," based on projections from the Boston Consulting Group — many of which, the company hopes, will be powered by Intel processors.

At the same time, Intel has unveiled a new Xeon processor for the data center as it looks to capture both the cloud and edge ends of the AI revolution. This, the company says, will offer a 21 percent boost in performance over last-generation parts and, like the Core Ultra, includes on-board acceleration for ML and AI workloads — boosting performance of large models, up to 20 billion parameters, by a claimed 42 percent.

Finally, Gelsinger showcased the company's upcoming Intel Gaudi3 dedicated deep-learning accelerator, which is claimed to target "large-scale generative AI models" among other workloads. Designed to compete with GPU-based accelerators from NVIDIA and AMD, Gaudi3 will be launching in 2024 as part of what the CEO describes as "a suite of AI accelerators."

Machines based on the Intel Core Ultra are available now from selected US retailers, Intel has confirmed, with holiday shipping available; over the course of 2024, the part will be rolled out to over 230 designs from laptop and desktop manufacturers.