Betting big on Artificial Intelligence(AI), technology major Intel has introduced its portfolio of AI products to enable customers’ AI solutions across the data centre, cloud, network, edge and PC. At its “AI Everywhere” event in New York, the company announced the launch of Intel Core Ultra processor, said to power AI PC and new applications. This is Intel’s largest architectural shift in 40 years and launches the AI PC generation with innovation on multiple fronts including CPU compute, graphics, power, battery life and profound new AI features, said the company.
Intel is partnering with more than 100 software vendors to bring AI-boosted applications to the PC market. For consumer and commercial customers, this means a larger and more extensive set of AI-enhanced applications will run on Intel Core Ultra.
Xeon processor
It also launched the 5th Gen Intel Xeon processor, aimed to bring a leap in performance and efficiency. Compared with the previous generation of Xeon, these processors deliver 21 per cent average performance gain for general compute performance and enable 36 per cent higher average performance per watt across a range of customer workloads.
Xeon is the mainstream data centre processor with built-in AI acceleration, with the new 5th Gen Xeon delivering up to 42 per cent higher inference and fine-tuning on models as large as 20 billion parameters, said the company.
Xeon’s built-in AI accelerators, together with optimised software and enhanced telemetry capabilities, enable more manageable and efficient deployments of demanding network and edge workloads for communication service providers, content delivery networks and broad vertical markets, including retail, healthcare and manufacturing.
Patrick P Gelsinger, CEO of Intel, said, “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.”
He also reinforced that Intel is on track to deliver five new process technology nodes in four years.
To make AI hardware technologies as accessible and easy-to-use as possible, Intel builds optimisations into the AI frameworks developers use (like PyTorch and TensorFlow) and offers foundational libraries (through one API) to make software portable and highly performant across different types of hardware, said the company. “Intel is on a mission to bring AI everywhere through exceptionally engineered platforms, secure solutions and support for open ecosystems. Our AI portfolio gets even stronger with today’s launch of Intel Core Ultra ushering in the age of the AI PC and AI-accelerated 5th Gen Xeon for the enterprise,” Gelsinger added.
The CEO also noted that Intel has seen a rapid expansion of its Gaudi pipeline due to growing and proven performance advantages combined with highly competitive TCO and pricing. With increasing demand for generative AI solutions, Intel expects to capture a larger portion of the accelerator market in 2024 with its suite of AI accelerators led by Gaudi.