Intel believes that the next processor we have in our PC should include a dedicated AI processor. Its next generation chips meteor lake They want to fill that void. It has been detailed at Computex 2023 that its vision processing units (VPUs) will be taken advantage of, and that Intel is including these processors in all Meteor Lake chips.
The VPU is not new. Intel introduced this dedicated AI processor with its 13th generation Raptor Lake processors in a select few models. They say they will come standard on all Meteor Lake chips, whose launch is scheduled for the end of 2023.
Intel believes the breakthrough is in AI processors in CPUs
Intel's idea is to move the AI processing that is already done on the CPU and GPU to a dedicated processor. More than 100 applications already take advantage of AI in the CPU or GPU. Dedicated VPUs would be more power efficient in these tasks to save battery life and would allow running much more complex AI models.
According to Intel, seemingly quaint effects like background replacement in Microsoft Teams and dynamic noise suppression for improve the quality of video calls have become exponentially more sophisticated in the last two years. Compared to 2021, Intel claims that background replacement is 10 times more complex, and dynamic noise suppression is 50 times more complex today.
Intel claims that the VPU offers 10 times more AI computing power than running them on the CPU, and with only a fifth of the power. This efficiency would focus mainly on laptops. They don't want to offload all the work to the VPU, as the CPU and GPU still have their place. The GPU remains an ideal choice for AI-involved media creation tasks, while the CPU can handle simpler AI tasks that require very low latency.
In addition to providing more power to AI programs, the dedicated processor can improve overall performance. They demonstrated this using the Unreal Engine, where the VPU parsed footage to create a mesh on a virtual avatar. The GPU usually takes care of this task, so when transferring it to the VPU, the GPU can take care of other processes. For now, these AI processors seem to be mostly focused on laptops. It is possible that a dedicated AI processor could be used in desktops in the future, but we will have to wait for the major manufacturers to announce desktop models with these VPUs.
Source: Digital Trends
