Intel Bet on Artificial Intelligence at Innovation 2023

The opening keynote for Intel Innovation 2023, Intel’s annual conference for developers and partners, has just concluded. What Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger illustrated is a crucial all-in move in artificial intelligence.. From the announcement of the new Intel Developer Cloud platform being opened to the public to the official arrival in December of the new fifth generation Intel Core Ultra processor (formerly known as Meteor Lake) and Xeon processors (but Xeon with 288 E-Core cores). !), the main theme of the entire keynote was the inexorable ongoing revolution brought about by artificial intelligence.

And Intel’s new mission is to keeping even the humble personal computer at the center of this revolution

with the promise of bringing neural network-based applications from large data centers to PCs, with the ability to run locally, even without a cloud connection.

It’s a message that Gelsinger repeated several times in his speech: artificial intelligence is not just giant language models with billions of parameters exclusive to big tech companies and their colossal data centers. There are also much smaller artificial intelligence models for applications that can help in everyday life and which Thanks to the new Core Ultra processors, they will also be able to run locally with quite reasonable performance and latency.

During his keynote, the Acer CEO showed off one of the first laptops to hit the market, the Acer Swift ultrabook, capable of generating images locally in seconds using a stable diffusion plugin for open-source Gimp software.

But there was also room for a quick demonstration of a prototype processor based on the Lunar Lake architecture, two generations ahead of Meteor Lake, with the ability to generate a Taylor Swift-style song in less than 10 seconds. The winner of the 2023 Ignite Award is Deep Render, a startup that has developed an innovative video compression format that uses artificial intelligence to achieve low-bitrate image quality unattainable by any traditional codec. Technology that also runs locally on the laptop thanks to the graphics and NPU integrated into the new Core Ultra processors.

The new Intel Core Ultra processors, Gelsinger hinted, were designed for a new world in which artificial intelligence will permeate everyday use of personal computers, a world that is just around the corner with the imminent arrival of CoPilot in Windows 11 and its generative artificial intelligence. based features.

The keynote also provided an opportunity to results of Intel’s ambitious roadmap “5 nodes in 4 years”. Well, it looks like things have finally picked up the right pace for the American giant: with the Core Ultra, the Intel 4 node goes into mass production, the Intel 3 will follow by the end of the year, and Gelsinger showed off the first Intel node wafer on stage. 20A, which will power Arrow Lake processors in 2024, which Intel’s CEO says is ahead of schedule. The Intel 18A node will also arrive at Intel factories in the first quarter of 2024, which will be used to develop the new Clearwater Forest E-Core for the next generation of Xeon processors in 2025.