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Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger says AI on PCs will be a “transformative moment in technological innovation.”
Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg
Intel is targeting the AI opportunity head-on.
The chipmaker believes the next generation of PCs will be able to run AI inference applications natively. Executives from Dell Technologies (ticker: DELL) and HP Inc. (HPQ) have said AI-enabled laptops will hit the market in 2024, and Intel aims to help them achieve that goal.
On Tuesday, at a developer event in San Jose, Intel (INTC) CEO Pat Gelsinger unveiled plans for the “AI PC,” which he said will “bring AI everywhere at scale.”
The company said AI-enabled PCs will be enabled by the Intel Core Ultra processor, codenamed Meter Lake, which will begin shipping on December 14. The new processor will include Intel’s first integrated neutral processing unit “for energy-efficient AI acceleration and local inference.”
The battle to provide chips for developing and inferring large AI language models is heating up. Nvidia (NVDA) now dominates the market for graphics processors, or GPUs, used in data centers to develop AI models, but both Intel and newly public Arm (ARM) see opportunities for central processors, or CPUs, that can power AI inference applications on laptops and Run on mobile devices. (Nvidia’s high-end GPUs are too big and expensive to put in PCs.)
Providing local AI capabilities on a laptop would change the direction of the PC industry, allowing consumers to run generative AI applications locally without the need for a connection to the cloud.
Gelsinger says AI on PCs will be a “fundamental turning point in technological innovation.” Among other things, Gelsinger said the new PCs will be able to run Microsoft’s Copilot software to handle AI tasks for personal productivity applications and other software.
Intel also announced plans to build a large AI supercomputer on Intel Xeon processors and Intel Gaudi2 AI hardware accelerators, with large language model Stability.AI as an anchor customer.
Intel shares fell 2.5% on Tuesday.
Write to Eric J. Savitz at [email protected]