Meet Intel’s Dedicated Silicon for Local AI Processing

When Intel’s “Meteor Lake” processors launch, they’ll feature not just CPU cores spread across two on-chip tiles, alongside an on-die GPU portion, but also the company’s first-ever Neural Processing Unit (NPU) devoted to AI workloads. 

According to Intel, the NPU means generative AI programs such as Stable Diffusion, or today’s chatbots working off of a locally hosted language model, can run natively on Meteor Lake laptops, without suffering from slow performance, poor quality, or crippling power demands. 

“At Intel, our goal is to democratize AI, building it around standardized interfaces, making it accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world,” said Tim Wilson, Intel’s general manager for SOC design. 

The resulting NPU promises to offer as much as an eight-times…