Tag Archives: Intels

Intel is laser-focused on improving its graphics technology of late. Not only has the company re-entered the graphics card market for the first time in more than 20 years, with its Intel Arc “Alchemist” family of discrete graphics cards, but Intel has also pressed its on-CPU integrated graphics processor (IGP) tech harder than ever. Now, the big chip maker has revealed that it is putting much of that graphics innovation surrounding Arc to work in its upcoming “Meteor Lake” processors. (See our larger explainer for an architectural overview of what’s new with the coming Meteor Lake chips.)

Though these new chips have not been explicitly broken out, part by part, in detail just yet, the assumption is that they will arrive first as mobile processors for laptops. A launch date for the…

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…