While the first systems based on Intel’s forthcoming Meteor Lake (14th Gen Core) systems are still at least a few months out – and thus just a bit too far out to show off at Computex – Intel is already laying the groundwork for Meteor Lake’s forthcoming launch. For this year’s show, in what’s very quickly become an AI-centric event, Intel is using Computex to lay out their vision of client-side AI inference for the next generation of systems. This includes both some new disclosures about the AI processing hardware that will be in intel’s Meteor Lake hardware, as well as what Intel expects OSes and software developers are going to do with the new capabilities.
AI, of course, has quickly become the operative buzzword of the technology industry over the last several months, especially following the public introduction of ChatGPT and the explosion of interest in what’s now being termed “Generative AI”. So like the early adoption stages of other major new compute technologies, hardware and software vendors alike are still in the process of figuring out what can be done with this new technology, and what are the best hardware designs to power it. And behind all of that… let’s just say there’s a lot of potential revenue waiting in the wings for those companies that succeed in this new AI race.
Intel for its part is no stranger to AI hardware, though it’s certainly not a field that normally receives top billing at a company best known for its CPUs and fabs (and in that order). Intel’s stable of wholly-owned subsidiaries in this space includes Movidius, who makes low power vision processing units (VPUs), and Habana Labs, responsible for the Gaudi family of high-end deep learning accelerators. But even within Intel’s rank-and-file client products, the company has been including some very basic, ultra-low-power AI-adjacent hardware in the form of their Gaussian & Neural Accelerator (DNA) block for audio processing, which has been in the Core family since the Ice Lake architecture.
Still, in 2023 the winds are clearly blowing in the direction of adding even more AI hardware at every level, from the client to the server. So for Computex Intel is disclosing a bit more on their AI efforts for Meteor Lake.
