Yesterday Intel announced  PC chips that have been designed into 230 PC models, some already in the stores.

Intel says its top of the range PC chip Core Ultra 7 165H offers an 11% improvement in multi-threading performance  compared to the AMD Ryzen 7 7840U, Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3, and Apple M3, with a 25% reduction in power consumption compared with the Intel Core i7-1370P and 79% lower power than AMD’s Ryzen 7 7840U at the same 28W envelope.

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The new CPUs have an NPU delivering low-power AI acceleration and CPU/GPU off-load capable of performing AI-powered tasks, like background blur, eye tracking, and picture framing. 

For AI workloads, Intel says Core Ultra chips can reach up to 34 TeraOPS when combining performance across the NPU, GPU and CPU.

The chips will make AI services cheaper, faster and more private than using services based in cloud data centres, said CEO Pat Gelsinger.

“That will be the star of the show in this coming year,” said Gelsinger, “you’re unleashing this power for every person, every use case, every location in the future.”

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Accelerator ICs used for training AI models have been driving the industry recently but, points out Gelsinger, companies will be more concerned about running completed programmes which can be done with data centre and PC chips.

“A few people create models — lots of people use them,” said Gelsinger, arguing that AI will be handled by PCs and other devices because of the high costs of data centres.

Yesterday Intel also brought out its third top-of-the-range Xeon chip in one year. 2023 started with the 3rd generation Xeon and ended with the 5th.

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No.5 has 64 cores with 8-channel DDR5-5600 memory and UPI speeds up to 20GT/s for faster CPU-to-CPU communication.

Next year comes the Gaudi 3 accelerator IC to compete with the best that Nvidia (currently) has to offer.

“We’re going to do a decade of semiconductor work in four years,” said Gelsinger, “that’s pretty crazy. We’re on track, baby.”