Upcoming Intel ‘Meteor Lake’ CPUs Will Function ‘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 yr. On the sidelines of the Computex commerce present in Taipei, Intel demonstrated for the primary time a prototype laptop computer working 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 serious launch for Intel, persevering with its heterogenous core technique but in addition utilizing a chiplet-based structure and leveraging the corporate’s Foveros manufacturing course of to stack a number of layers. It’ll 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 will even function built-in Intel Arc GPUs based mostly on the first-gen ‘Alchemist’ Intel Xe structure.

Now, firm representatives tout the growing significance of AI processing on-device, slightly than by means of the usage of cloud providers. ‘A whole bunch’ of apps and experiences are able to leverage AI, together with generally used productiveness and creativity instruments from Adobe, Microsoft and Google. In keeping with Intel, customers can anticipate to expertise issues similar to much better background separation on video calls, computerized 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 personal briefing the place Intel confirmed its prototype laptop computer working the Secure Diffusion generative AI mannequin, which permits anybody to create utterly authentic photos based mostly solely on textual content prompts for issues similar to subject material, theme, and inventive type. Intel has developed a easy plug-in for Secure 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 serious promoting level for the longer term 14th Gen Intel Core CPU household, native offline AI processing might help improve energy effectivity, protect privateness, and scale back latency. With AI fashions similar to ChatGPT changing into an increasing number of complicated with every iteration, devoted {hardware} ought to change into related.

The corporate shouldn’t 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 stability of CPU, GPU and VPU {hardware} of precise transport CPUs can be. Nevertheless, 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 urged that the ‘i’ within the Core i3, i5, i7 and i9 names goes away, and a minimum of one occasion of a purported “Core Extremely 7” CPU has appeared in benchmark databases on-line, as product growth has possible begun.