Today, at its "AI Everywhere" launch in New York, leading global technology company, Intel, announced an impressive range of artificial intelligence (AI) products designed to bring AI solutions to different platforms including data centres, cloud, networks and personal computers (PCs).
The unveiling featured the Intel Core Ultra mobile processor family, based on Intel 4 process technology and benefiting from the company's largest architectural shift in four decades. These power-efficient processors signal the advent of the AI PC era. Furthermore, the 5th Gen Intel Xeon processor family showcased the inclusion of AI acceleration in every core promising significant improvements in overall performance while reducing total cost of ownership.
Pat Gelsinger, CEO of Intel, stated, "AI innovation is poised to raise the digital economy's impact up to as much as one-third of global gross domestic product. 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."
The Intel Core Ultra has been launched as a representation of Intel's largest architectural shift in 40 years. It initiates the AI PC era through innovation in CPU computation, graphics, power and battery life, and notable new AI features. It represents the most significant transformation of the PC experience in 20 years, since the introduction of Intel Centrino's ability to connect laptops to Wi-Fi from any location.
The Intel Core Ultra also features the company's first AI accelerator designed for client computing - the neural processing unit (NPU). This enables enhanced power-efficient AI acceleration, offering 2.5x better power efficiency than the previous generation. Moreover, Intel is partnering with over 100 software vendors to bring several hundred AI-boosted applications to the PC market, promising an improved PC experience for both consumer and commercial customers.
The 5th Gen Intel Xeon processor family, launched concurrently, boasts significant leaps in performance and efficiency. Compared with the previous generation of Xeon, these processors deliver a 21% average performance gain for general compute performance while enabling 36% higher average performance per watt across various customer workloads. Customers undergoing a typical five-year refresh cycle can reduce their total cost of ownership by up to 77%.
Highlighting more uses of AI, both Intel Core Ultra and 5th Gen Xeon will find uses in areas such as restaurants that recommend menu choices based on the customer's budget and dietary needs, or manufacturing floors that detect quality and safety issues at source. This reflects the rapidly growing sector of edge computing, which is expected to inflate to a $445 billion global market by the end of the decade, with edge and client devices driving 1.4x more demand for inference than the data centre.
In his closing statement, Gelsinger also provided an update on Intel Gaudi3, a next-generation AI accelerator for deep learning and large-scale generative AI models, which is due to arrive next year.