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

Intel has begun teasing particulars of its upcoming ‘Meteor Lake’ CPU structure, which needs to 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 pc imaginative and prescient tech, which it acquired in 2016 after which supplied as a standalone USB gadget.  

Meteor Lake is a serious 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 may even function built-in Intel Arc GPUs based mostly on the first-gen ‘Alchemist’ Intel Xe structure.

Now, firm representatives tout the rising significance of AI processing on-device, somewhat than by way of using cloud providers. ‘A whole lot’ of apps and experiences are able to leverage AI, together with generally used productiveness and creativity instruments from Adobe, Microsoft and Google. In accordance with 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 unique pictures based mostly solely on textual content prompts for issues reminiscent of material, theme, and inventive type. 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 parts, the demonstration ran in roughly 20 seconds. The picture was generated solely on-device, with no Web connectivity wanted.

As a serious promoting level for the long run 14th Gen Intel Core CPU household, native offline AI processing will help enhance energy effectivity, protect privateness, and scale back latency. With AI fashions reminiscent of ChatGPT turning into an increasing number of complicated with every iteration, devoted {hardware} ought to turn into related.

The corporate is just not 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 transport CPUs will likely 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. Latest leaks have prompt 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 growth has doubtless begun.