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At its “AI Everywhere” launch in New York City on 14th December 2023, Intel introduced an unmatched portfolio of AI products to enable customers’ AI solutions everywhere — across the data centre, cloud, network, edge and PC. We were invited by the Intel regional team of the Middle East at a hotel to watch the live event with Intel partners and manufacturers using Intel products and services.
Pat Gelsinger showcased Intel’s expansive AI footprint, spanning cloud and enterprise servers to networks, volume clients and ubiquitous edge environments.
“AI innovation is poised to raise the digital economy’s impact up to as much as one-third of global gross domestic product, 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 edge, where data is generated and used.
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 today’s launch of Intel Core Ultra ushering in the age of the AI PC and AI-accelerated 5th Gen Xeon for the enterprise,”
Intel Core Ultra Processors
Intel Core Ultra represents the company’s largest architectural shift in 40 years with a chip that delivers on every front: CPU computing, graphics, power, battery life and AI experiences.
Michelle Johnston Holthaus, Intel executive vice president and general manager of Client Computing Group
“The launch of Intel Core Ultra represents the unmatched scale and speed at which Intel is enabling AI on the PC. In the next four years, AI PCs will comprise 80% of the PC market2 and together with our vast ecosystem of hardware and software partners, Intel is best positioned to deliver this next generation of computing.”
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 generation2. Its world-class GPU and leadership 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 competition3.
Intel Core Ultra-based AI PCs are available now from select U.S. retailers for the holiday season. Over the next year, Intel Core Ultra will bring AI to more than 230 designs from laptop and PC makers worldwide. AI PCs will comprise 80% of the PC market by 20284 and will bring new tools to the way we work, learn and create.
What It Does
Intel Core Ultra is the first processor built on the Intel 4 process technology and represents the company’s largest architectural shift in 40 years. It uses Foveros 3D advanced packaging technology, allowing advanced intellectual properties (IPs) to match leading-edge processes to optimize performance and capability. New Performance-core (P-core) architecture brings improved instructions per cycle (IPC). New efficient cores (E-cores) and low-power efficient cores (LP E-cores)provide scalable, multi-threaded performance of up to 11% over the competition to deliver leadership CPU computing for ultrathin PCs.
Intel Core Ultra offers a built-in Intel Arc GPU that features up to eight Xe-cores, AI-based Xe Super Sampling (XeSS), DX12 Ultimate support, and up to double the graphics performance over the previous generation.5 The GPU includes support for modern graphics features including hardware-accelerated ray tracing, mesh shading, AV1 encoding and decode, HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort 2.1 20G.
Intel’s newest NPU, branded Intel AI Boost, is purpose-built to handle longer-running AI workloads at low power, and it complements AI handled on both the CPU and GPU, enabling 2.5x better power efficiency than the previous generation.
The new processor family also offers
- Up to 16 cores (six P-cores, eight E-cores, two LP E-cores), 22 threads and next-generation Intel Thread Director for optimal workload scheduling.
- Up to 5.1 gigahertz (GHz) maximum turbo frequency.
- Up to 64 gigabytes (GB) LP5/x and up to 96 GB DDR5 maximum memory capacity.
- Leading wireless features include integrated Intel Wi-Fi 6E (Gig+) and support for discrete Intel Wi-Fi 7 (5 Gig) for multi-gigabit speeds in more locations, wired-like responsiveness and extreme reliability.
- Intel Killer software for intelligent connection optimization and network traffic prioritization for gamer and creator applications.
- Intel Bluetooth LE Audio to enable low-power, immersive, high-fidelity PC sonic experiences and support for new Bluetooth Auracast capabilities for broadcast audio tuning, personal audio sharing, and enhanced accessibility for hearing aids and new assisted listening services.
- Blazing connection speeds of 40 gigabits per second (Gbps) with Thunderbolt 4 providing PC connectivity to multiple 4K monitors, fast storage and other accessories.
- OpenVINO toolkits support minimal code changes and automatic device detection enhances AI performance by routing workloads to the right compute engine and streamlined workflow with ONNX and ONNX Runtime for faster inferencing.
About Intel Evo Edition Powered by Intel Core Ultra: Intel Evo edition laptops continue to deliver the best overall laptop experience with no-compromise mobile performance, intelligent collaboration and a multidevice experience through Intel Unison. The newest Intel Evo edition laptops will feature the new badge and offer:
- Cooler, quieter performance and responsiveness.
- Increased power efficiency for 10+ hours of real-world battery life on full high-definition designs.
- Instant wake and fast charging.
- Enhanced video effects, including Microsoft Studio Effects.
- High-quality cameras meet the VCX camera metric.
- New Intel Unison premium features extend the PC to any tablet or phone.
- Minimum of EPEAT silver certification for responsible and sustainable PC design.
- Intel connectivity software for intelligent connection optimization and network traffic prioritization for standard user productivity, collaboration and entertainment.
Additionally, the Engineered for Intel Evo program ensures accessories meet strict performance requirements for a seamless PC experience. This year, the program extends its list of industry partners bringing to market new Bluetooth LE Audio and hearing aid accessories, Thunderbolt docks, monitors, storage, Bluetooth headsets, mice, keyboards and access points.
What’s Next
Consumer devices powered by Intel Core Ultra mobile processors are available starting today, with commercial devices built on the Intel vPro platform coming soon.
New Xeon Brings More Powerful AI to the Data Center, Cloud, Network and Edge
The 5th Gen Intel Xeon processor family brings a significant leap in performance and efficiency5: A 21% average performance gain6 at the same thermal design power enables a 36% gain in performance per watt7. Customers following a typical five-year refresh cycle and upgrading from even older generations can reduce their TCO by up to 77%8.
Sandra Rivera, Intel executive vice president and general manager of Data Center and AI Group
“Designed for AI, our 5th Gen Intel Xeon processors provide greater performance to customers deploying AI capabilities across cloud, network and edge use cases. As a result of our long-standing work with customers, partners and the developer ecosystem, we’re launching 5th Gen Intel Xeon on a proven foundation that will enable rapid adoption and scale at lower TCO.”
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. It’s also the only CPU with a consistent and ever-improving set of MLPerf training and inference benchmark results.
Xeon’s built-in AI accelerators, together with optimized 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.
During today’s event, IBM announced that 5th Gen Intel Xeon processors achieved up to 2.7x better query throughput on its watsonx.data platform compared to previous-generation Xeon processors during testing. Google Cloud, which will deploy 5th Gen Xeon next year, noted that Palo Alto Networks experienced a 2x performance boost in its threat detection deep learning models by using built-in acceleration in 4th Gen Xeon through Google Cloud. And indie game studio Gallium Studios turned to Numenta’s AI platform running on Xeon processors to improve inference performance by 6.5x over a GPU-based cloud instance, saving cost and latency in its AI-based game, Proxi.
This kind of performance unlocks new possibilities for advanced AI – not only in the data centre and cloud but across the world’s networks and edge applications.
AI Acceleration and Solutions Everywhere Developers Need It
Both Core Ultra and 5th Gen Xeon will find their way into places you might not expect. Imagine a restaurant that guides your menu choices based on your budget and dietary needs; a manufacturing floor that catches quality and safety issues at the source; an ultrasound that sees what human eyes might miss; and a power grid that manages electricity with careful precision.
These edge computing use cases represent the fastest-growing segment of computing — projected to surge to a $445 billion global market by the end of the decade — within which AI is the fastest-growing workload. In that market, edge and client devices are driving 1.4x more demand for inference than the data centre.
In many cases, customers will employ a mix of AI solutions. Take Zoom, which runs AI workloads on Intel Core-based client systems and Intel Xeon-based-cloud solutions within its all-in-one communications and collaboration platform to deliver the best user experience and costs. Zoom uses AI to suppress the neighbour’s barking dog and blur your cluttered home office, and to generate a meeting summary and email.
To make AI hardware technologies as accessible and easy-to-use as possible, Intel builds optimizations into the AI frameworks developers use (like PyTorch and TensorFlow) and offers foundational libraries (through oneAPI) to make software portable and highly performant across different types of hardware.
Advanced developer tools, including Intel’s oneAPI and OpenVINO toolkit, help developers harness hardware acceleration for AI workloads and solutions and quickly build, optimize and deploy AI models across a wide variety of inference targets.
Why It Matters
Intel’s new processors provide impressive performance increases and overall benefits for the company’s customers and partners and enable the growth of optimized performance across key workloads.
What’s Next
With the launch of the 4th Gen Xeon processors in January 2023 and the launch of 5th Gen Xeon processors today, Intel continues to execute on its roadmap commitments to customers. Looking ahead, future Intel Xeon processors coming next year will deliver major advances in power efficiency and performance. Sierra Forest, with E-core efficiency and up to 288 cores, will arrive in the first half of 2024 and Granite Rapids, with P-core performance, will closely follow.
Sneak Peek: Intel Gaudi3 AI Accelerator
Wrapping up the event, Gelsinger provided an update on Intel Gaudi3, coming next year. He showed for the first time the next-generation AI accelerator for deep learning and large-scale generative AI models. Intel has seen a rapid expansion of its Gaudi pipeline due to growing and proven performance advantages combined with highly competitive pricing. With increasing demand for generative AI solutions, Intel expects to capture a larger portion of the accelerator market in 2024 with its suite of AI accelerators led by Gaudi.
With partners and a broad ecosystem, Intel is unlocking new growth opportunities fueled by AI, bringing AI everywhere.
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