Intel Unleashes Core Ultra, 5th Gen Xeon & Gaudi 3; Locks Horns With AMD, Nvidia

In a global launch event held in the United States, tech giant and chip maker Intel unveiled the new 14th Gen Intel Core mobile processors, officially launched as the Intel Core Ultra series.

The Intel Core Ultra mobile processor family, the first one to be built on the Intel 4 process technology and the first to benefit from the company’s largest architectural shift in 40 years. Intel claims this line-up as its most power-efficient processor to date as it officially enters the era of the AI PC.

The 5th Gen Intel Xeon processor family is built with AI acceleration in every core, bringing leaps in AI and overall performance and lowering total cost of ownership (TCO). Another launch that toom place at Intel’s AI Everywhere event that tantalised tech journalists was the Intel Gaudi 3, the tech company’s AI accelerator that will be hitting the markets in 2024.

Intel partners such as Acer, ASUS, Dell, Dynabook, Gigabyte, Google Chromebook, HP, Lenovo, LG, Microsoft Surface, MSI and Samsung will be offering their products equipped with the new Intel chips.

On being asked how he sees the transition happening to AI-powered PCs, Santosh Vishwanath, VP and MD, India Region, Intel drew a parallel between now and the time when the Indian market was transitioning from feature phones to smartphones.

As per reports, if talking solely of laptop CPUs, Intel has the upper hand in global market share, accounting for 69.3 per cent (based on laptop CPU test benchmark results in the third quarter of 2023) and now, with the launch of the Core Ultra line of AI-powered CPUs, Intel has officially locked horns with companies like AMD, Nvidia and Qualcomm in a bet to reach the top of the AI mountain. What’s at the summit? We are yet to see.

Intel’s official press release states that the AI PC represents a new generation of personal computers to meet this demand. With dedicated AI acceleration capability spread across the central processing unit (CPU), graphics processing unit (GPU) and neural processing unit (NPU) architectures, Intel Core Ultra is the most AI-capable and power-efficient client processor in Intel’s history.

Intel’s new Core Ultra CPUs also bank on delivering power-efficient AI acceleration for edge computing, supporting demanding visual workloads for creators and enabling better computing operations across a range of vertical markets such as healthcare, retail and manufacturing.

What Can Users Expect From Intel’s AI PCs? 

Intel Core Ultra is the first processor built on the Intel 4 process technology. The fact that Intel is touting this as ‘the company’s largest architectural shift in 40 years’ says a lot about it.

Intel claims that the new Performance-core architecture will bring improved instructions per cycle (IPC). The new and Efficient-core and the low-power Efficient-cores (E-cores and LP E-cores) will offer provide more scalable and multi-threaded performance of up to 11 per cent over the competition.

What’s New? 

The interesting thing about the new line of Intel Core Ultra devices would definitely be the Arc GPU that offers up to eight (8) Xe-cores, AI-based Xe Super Sampling (XeSS), DX12 Ultimate support and as per Intel, up to 2X the graphics performance over the previous generation.

The GPU includes support for modern graphics features including hardware-accelerated ray tracing, mesh shading, AV1 encode and decode, HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort 2.1 20G. This puts this chip at par with the top-of-the-line Nvidia and AMD GPUs.

Another exciting offering in this new line of machines will be Intel’s NPU, touted as Intel AI Boost. This is built-in to handle longer-running AI workloads at low power, allowing for 2.5X better power efficiency than the previous generation.

The Gaudi 3: Intel’s Bet Against Nvidia’s H100

Intel did not reveal any details about the Gaudi 3, however, it did mention that it will compete with the competition, i.e., Nvidia’s H100 and AMD’s anticipated MI300x which will be launched next year. The Gaudi 3 is Intel’s new tech which will be launched next year. This chip will have an interesting road ahead as it will fight it out with Nvidia and AMD while catering to companies that have high AI workloads. With companies’ demand for such processors increasing by the day, the Gaudi 3 along with the H100 and the soon-to-be-released MI300x will definitely heat up the market.

5th Gen Intel Xeon: An Upgrade For Edge Computing

Intel’s non-consumer leg of microprocessors is ready for an AP-powered update with the unveiling of the 5th Gen Xeon processor. Code-named ‘Emerald Rapids’, Intel claims to deliver increased performance per watt and lower total cost of ownership or TCO across critical workloads. This launch marks the second Xeon family upgrade in less than a year. The processors are software and platform-compatible with 4th Gen Intel Xeon processors, allowing customers to upgrade and maximize the longevity of infrastructure investments.

‘Less demanding end-to-end AI workloads before customers need to add discrete accelerators — including up to 42 per cent higher inference performance and less than 100-millisecond latency on large language models (LLMs) under 20 billion parameters,’ this is how the microprocessor manufacturer is branding its all-new Xeon line-up.

The 5th Gen Xeon processors support up to 64 cores per CPU and nearly 3X the maximum last-level cache from the previous generation. They offer eight channels of DDR5 per CPU, support DDR5 at up to 5,600 megatransfers per second (MT/s) and increase inter-socket bandwidth with Intel UPI 2.0, offering up to 20 GT/s.

“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,” said Sandra Rivera, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Data Center and AI Group, Intel while unveiling the product.

Intel’s first NPU-equipped CPU line is all set to enter the market and join the AI gold rush. How exactly these processors will impact daily computing is yet to be seen. What fascinated the most was the lack of use cases presented at the Intel AI Everywhere event. The same can be said for detailed benchmark data. However, the question that concerned me the most was about the daunting task that tech companies had at hand. How exactly are companies like Intel and AMD going to educate the masses about the concept of an AI PC? I believe we’ll find out soon.