With artificial intelligence (AI) being the talk of the town in 2023, major technology companies have doubled down on their commitment to embrace AI in the future. Whether it’s Google’s new PaLM 2 large language model or OpenAI’s GPT-4—more and more businesses are rapidly joining the so-called AI race. Now, on the hardware front, US-based chipmaker Intel has also announced plans to “build AI into every product" that it makes.
As reported by The Verge, during Intel’s Q2 2023 earnings call, CEO Pat Gelsinger came forward with the company’s plans to increase focus on AI-centric development moving ahead. “Across every aspect of consumer, developer and enterprise efficiency use cases, we see that there’s going to be a raft of AI enablement and those will be client-centered," Gelsinger said.
He added, “Whether it’s a client, whether it’s an edge platform for retail and manufacturing and industrial use cases, whether it’s an enterprise data center, they’re not going to stand up a dedicated 10-megawatt farm."
The effects of this AI-first approach will be observed as soon as the end of this year. Intel plans to ship its 14th generation Meteor Lake chipsets by the end of this year—which will be the company’s first chipsets to include built-in neural processors for machine learning tasks.
According to Intel, the Meteor Lake series of chipsets will be the first client processor manufactured on the new Intel 4 process node. This means that they will be made using a smaller, more efficient manufacturing process—which could lead to better compute performance, more efficiency and better graphical performance as well. And, the Meteor Lake chipsets will be the first to ever feature a dedicated AI engine called Intel AI Boost.
This focus on AI comes after facing losses for two consecutive quarters, but the company has returned to profits—as seen in its second-quarter earnings report.