Last week we learned that Meteor Lake, the next generation of Intel processors, will mark the before and after in terms of artificial intelligence. And so it is that according to what Intel and Microsoft told us during Build 2023, the fourteenth generation of Intel Core (waiting on whether it will get such a name or not) will bring artificial intelligence computing to the desktop, integrating VPU (Visual Processing Unit, Vision Processing Unit), a key element for real-time image processing that enables the deployment of artificial intelligence-based applications.

Not even a week has passed since then and Intel has now taken advantage of the Computex 2023 celebrations to show Meteor Lake to a large extent, and what we can expect from this generation in relation to artificial intelligence. As we told you last week, Intel will use the chiplet architecture to integrate this new element, which uses the technology of Movidius, the company it acquired seven years ago, in 2016, and already then gave birth to Intel Movidius. Myriad., a proposal that won the 2017 MuyComputer Award for Most Disruptive Technology.

To make this presentation, Intel brought to Computex 2023 a a working prototype Meteor Lake CPU, labeled Intel 0000, with 16 cores (6R+8E+2E, second in SoC) and 22 threads. In the tests of some participants, Windows detected the VPU as the Movidius NPU (Neural Process Unit), the original technology from 2017, although Intel clarified that the version built into Meteor Lake is based on this technology, but the current implementation is three generations ahead. This integrated has 1.6 MB L1 cache, 18 MB L2 cache and 24 MB L3 cache and its base frequency is 3.1 GHz.

Of course, the reason we brought this working prototype of Meteor Lake to the event is to get started. to show what next generation CPU systems will be able to offer from Intel, and in this regard we could already see that the technology company has been working with free software companies and projects for some time, so that once Meteor Lake debuts on the market, users can start using its support for artificial intelligence from the first moment.

So the company has shown some images like the one you can see in the top paragraph that hints at some effects applied in real time that will use the integrated VPUand also shows the huge difference in computing power requirement for the same with and without this NPU. The new features mentioned are automatic framing (we can understand this based on the face tracking technology), eye contact simulation, gesture based avatar animation and gesture recognition.

These functions are actually nothing new, you can find some of them in NVIDIA Broadcast, for example, which is based on integrated NVIDIA RTX graphics cards from three generations (20, 30 and 40). However, since the VPU will be integrated into all models of all generation Meteor Lake families, this is the case will serve to significantly expand the scopeand therefore accessibility to them.

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