Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger recently unveiled the next era of PCs at the chip giant’s Innovation conference in San Jose. During his keynote, Gelsinger emphasized the importance of running large language models and other machine-learning workloads locally and securely on users’ own PCs. He highlighted the transformative power of AI and its ability to revolutionize productivity and creativity across various domains.
Gelsinger acknowledged the contributions of AI leaders such as OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman, Microsoft’s CTO Kevin Scott, and Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang. While the high-end AI work done by these companies is impressive, Gelsinger believes the real opportunity lies in bringing these models to the masses by allowing users to run them on their personal computers.
The success of the so-called AI PC generation, as Gelsinger referred to it, will depend heavily on the creation of killer apps. To demonstrate the capabilities of Intel’s hardware, Gelsinger showcased various AI-enhanced applications running on the company’s OpenVINO inferencing platform. These demonstrations included plugins for popular open-source software like Audacity and GIMP, which showcased image and music generation features.
Most of the demos highlighted Intel’s upcoming 7nm Core Ultra processors, codenamed Meteor Lake. These processors feature a multi-die architecture that pairs an Intel CPU with a TSMC-fabbed GPU. Additionally, they integrate a neural-processing engine derived from Intel’s Movidius vision processing unit.
While the focus of Gelsinger’s keynote was on PCs and notebooks performing AI inferencing, Intel also sees an opportunity to extend its influence to the edge of the network. Intel disclosed Project Strata, which aims to address challenges in deploying latency and bandwidth sensitive AI workloads at the edge. The company plans to extend support for its OpenVINO platform to Arm processors to accommodate low-power edge systems, including IoT sensors.
Despite the emphasis on AI inferencing, Intel still intends to compete with Nvidia and other companies in the AI training space. Gelsinger teased the development of what he claimed to be the world’s largest AI supercomputer in Europe, built in collaboration with Stability AI. This all-Intel system will leverage a combination of Xeon processors and 4,000 Gaudi2 AI accelerators.
Overall, Intel’s CEO Pat Gelsinger unveiled the next era of PCs, the AI PC generation, during his keynote at the company’s Innovation conference. Gelsinger emphasized the importance of running AI workloads locally and securely on users’ own PCs and showcased various AI-enhanced applications running on Intel’s hardware. He also outlined Intel’s plans for addressing the edge computing market and its commitment to AI training.
