Intel has begun teasing particulars of its upcoming ‘Meteor Lake’ CPU structure, which must be launched as a part of the 14th Gen Intel Core household beginning later this 12 months. On the sidelines of the Computex commerce present in Taipei, Intel demonstrated for the primary time a prototype laptop computer operating an unidentified Meteor Lake engineering pattern CPU, displaying off its AI inference processing capabilities. Along with CPU and GPU cores, Meteor Lake introduces a brand new ‘VPU’ (imaginative and prescient processing unit) for AI acceleration. The VPU {hardware} is predicated on Intel’s Movidius laptop imaginative and prescient tech, which it acquired in 2016 after which provided as a standalone USB system.
Meteor Lake is a significant launch for Intel, persevering with its heterogenous core technique but additionally utilizing a chiplet-based structure and leveraging the corporate’s Foveros manufacturing course of to stack a number of layers. It is going to additionally combine and match chiplets fabbed by Intel itself on the brand new Intel 4 manufacturing course of in addition to ones outsourced to TSMC, for the primary time. As confirmed to Devices 360 by former Intel graphics chief Raja Koduri a short time in the past, Meteor Lake CPUs can even characteristic built-in Intel Arc GPUs primarily based on the first-gen ‘Alchemist’ Intel Xe structure.
Now, firm representatives tout the rising significance of AI processing on-device, relatively than via using cloud providers. ‘Lots of’ of apps and experiences are able to leverage AI, together with generally used productiveness and creativity instruments from Adobe, Microsoft and Google. In response to Intel, customers can anticipate to expertise issues similar to much better background separation on video calls, automated voice isolation and enhancement, superior language understanding and synthesis for interactions, real-time movement seize, and radically reimagined person interfaces that adapt to what the person is doing, all within the close to future.
Devices 360 was current at a non-public briefing the place Intel confirmed its prototype laptop computer operating the Steady Diffusion generative AI mannequin, which permits anybody to create utterly unique photographs primarily based solely on textual content prompts for issues similar to subject material, theme, and creative model. Intel has developed a easy plug-in for Steady Diffusion within the open-source GIMP picture editor. Focusing on totally different workloads on the chip’s CPU, GPU and VPU elements, the demonstration ran in roughly 20 seconds. The picture was generated fully on-device, with no Web connectivity wanted.
As a significant promoting level for the longer term 14th Gen Intel Core CPU household, native offline AI processing may also help improve energy effectivity, protect privateness, and cut back latency. With AI fashions similar to ChatGPT changing into increasingly complicated with every iteration, devoted {hardware} ought to develop into related.
The corporate just isn’t but able to disclose CPU specs for 14th Gen Core fashions, so it’s nonetheless unclear whether or not Meteor Lake will serve all segments, and what the launch dates, speeds, and stability of CPU, GPU and VPU {hardware} of precise delivery CPUs will probably be. Nonetheless, the corporate has indicated that energy administration is a precedence for this technology, and has additionally confirmed leaks {that a} main shakeup to the product naming scheme is imminent. Current leaks have recommended that the ‘i’ within the Core i3, i5, i7 and i9 names goes away, and no less than one occasion of a purported “Core Extremely 7” CPU has appeared in benchmark databases on-line, as product improvement has possible start.