Intel accelerates AI Everywhere with launch of next-gen products
Intel has introduced a portfolio of AI products to enable customers’ AI solutions everywhere — across the data centre, cloud, network, edge and PC.
“AI innovation is poised to raise the digital economy’s impact up to as much as one-third of global gross domestic product,” said Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger. “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.”
Gelsinger showcased Intel’s expansive AI footprint, spanning cloud and enterprise servers to networks, volume clients and ubiquitous edge environments, at the company’s AI Everywhere event in New York. He also reinforced that Intel is on track to deliver five new process technology nodes in four years.
“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 the launch of Intel Core Ultra ushering in the age of the AI PC and AI-accelerated 5th Gen Xeon for the enterprise,” Gelsinger said.
Intel Core Ultra represents the company’s largest architectural shift in 40 years and launches the AI PC generation with innovation on all fronts: CPU compute, graphics, power, battery life and new AI features. According to Intel, the AI PC represents the largest transformation of the PC experience in 20 years, since Intel Centrino untethered laptops to connect to WiFi from anywhere.
Intel Core Ultra features Intel’s first client on-chip AI accelerator — the neural processing unit, or NPU — to enable a new level of power-efficient AI acceleration with 2.5x better power efficiency than the previous generation. Its GPU and CPU are each also capable of speeding up AI solutions.
As important, Intel is partnering with more than 100 software vendors to bring several hundred AI-boosted applications to the PC market — a wide array of highly creative, productive and fun applications that will change the PC experience. For consumer and commercial customers, this means a larger and more extensive set of AI-enhanced applications will run great on Intel Core Ultra, particularly compared to competing platforms. For example, content creators working in Adobe Premiere Pro will enjoy 40% better performance versus the competition.
The new 5th Gen Intel Xeon processor family is also said to bring a significant leap in performance and efficiency: compared with the previous generation of Xeon, these processors deliver 21% average performance gain for general compute performance and enable 36% higher average performance per watt across a range of customer workloads, according to Intel. Customers following a typical five-year refresh cycle and upgrading from even older generations can reduce their TCO by up to 77%.
Xeon is the only mainstream data centre processor with built-in AI acceleration, with the new 5th Gen Xeon delivering up to 42% higher inference and fine-tuning on models as large as 20 billion parameters.
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.