Upcoming Intel ‘Meteor Lake’ CPUs Will Characteristic ‘VPUs’ for AI Acceleration

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, exhibiting 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} relies on Intel’s Movidius pc imaginative and prescient tech, which it acquired in 2016 after which provided as a standalone USB machine.  

Meteor Lake is a significant launch for Intel, persevering with its heterogenous core technique but in addition utilizing a chiplet-based format and leveraging the corporate’s Foveros manufacturing course of to stack a number of layers. It should 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 may also 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 by way of the usage of 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 reminiscent of 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 fully authentic pictures primarily based solely on textual content prompts for issues reminiscent of subject material, theme, and inventive model. Intel has developed a easy plug-in for Steady Diffusion within the open-source GIMP picture editor. Focusing on completely different workloads on the chip’s CPU, GPU and VPU parts, the demonstration ran in roughly 20 seconds. The picture was generated solely 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 can assist improve energy effectivity, protect privateness, and scale back latency. With AI fashions reminiscent of ChatGPT turning into increasingly complicated with every iteration, devoted {hardware} ought to turn out to be related.

The corporate will not be 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 steadiness of CPU, GPU and VPU {hardware} of precise transport CPUs will probably be. Nevertheless, the corporate has indicated that energy administration is a precedence for this era, and has additionally confirmed leaks {that a} main shakeup to the product naming scheme is imminent. Current leaks have advised that the ‘i’ within the Core i3, i5, i7 and i9 names goes away, and not less than one occasion of a purported “Core Extremely 7” CPU has appeared in benchmark databases on-line, as product improvement has doubtless begun.