Upcoming Intel 14th Gen Core Family 'Meteor Lake' CPUs Have Integrated 'VPUs' For Local AI Acceleration

Intel has officially demonstrated its latest Meteor Lake CPUs, which are capable of offering local AI Acceleration. These CPUs are referred to as VPUs or Vision Processing Units.

Intel is moving beyond traditional Central Processing Units or CPUs. Its latest Meteor Lake CPUs can independently offer AI Acceleration, which means laptops and desktops with Intel's upcoming CPUs will have advanced AI capabilities. Let's look at the available details of the latest Intel CPUs or APUs.

Upcoming 14th-Gen Intel CPUs Have Local Offline AI Processing

Intel teased details of its upcoming 'Meteor Lake' CPU architecture at the ongoing Computex 2023. The architecture should be released as part of the 14th Gen Intel Core family starting later this year.

Intel demonstrated a prototype laptop running an unidentified Meteor Lake engineering sample CPU. The CPU had AI inference processing capabilities. In addition to CPU and GPU cores, Meteor Lake introduces a new VPU (Vision Processing Unit) for AI acceleration.

Meteor Lake CPUs are a huge milestone for Intel as it is a chipset-based layout manufactured on the company's Foveros manufacturing process. Technicalities aside, Intel's Foveros process basically stacks multiple layers of CPUs inside a chiplet. Even AMD has a similar design for its ZEN 4 CPUs with RDNA 2 GPUs.

Meteor Lake CPUs from Intel will feature integrated Intel Arc GPUs based on the first-gen 'Alchemist' Intel Xe architecture. While these may not be as mature or powerful as the AMD RDNA 2 GPUs, they will offer local AI Acceleration or processing.

Intel Stresses On On-Device AI Processing: Reducing Dependence On Cloud Services?

Several platforms, tools, and even apps as well as "experiences" are being readied with deep integration of AI. All of these will need intense AI processing, which can only be provided by cloud services.

Intel claims users can expect to experience things such as far better background separation on video calls, automatic voice isolation and enhancement, superior language understanding and synthesis for interactions, real-time motion capture, and radically reimagined user interfaces that adapt to what the user is doing, all in the near future.

Simply put, Intel's Meteor Lake and future generations of CPUs would strive to help with AI or even become reduce the amount of information sent to cloud services for processing.

This should significantly cut down dependence on remote servers, and may even help reduce power and data consumption.

Local AI processing can also work offline. This can increase power efficiency, preserve privacy, and reduce latency, indicated Intel. Dedicated hardware for AI processing may also help AI models such as ChatGPT and image editors such as the one we recently discovered.