At its third annual Intel Innovation event, the company unveiled a range of technologies to bring artificial intelligence (AI) everywhere and make it more accessible in all workloads, from the client to the fringe to the network and the cloud.

“AI represents a generational shift that ushers in a new era of global expansion in which computing is even more important to achieving a better future for everyone,” said Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger. “It offers enormous social and business opportunities for developers to push the boundaries of what’s possible, create solutions to the world’s biggest challenges, and improve the lives of everyone on the planet.”
In the introductory presentation of the event aimed at developers,

Gelsinger showed how Intel is incorporating AI capabilities into its hardware products and making them available through open, multi-architecture software solutions. He also highlighted how AI is helping to drive “Silicon Economy”, “a growing economy made possible by the magic of silicon and software”. Today, silicon fuels are a 574 billion dollars which in turn drives the nearly $8 trillion global technology economy.

New advances in silicon, packaging and multi-chip solutions

The journey starts with silicon innovation. According to Gelsinger, Intel’s four-year five-node process development program is progressing at a rapid pace: Intel 7 is already in mass production, Intel 4 is ready for production, and Intel 3 is planned for later this year.

Gelsinger also showed an Intel 20A wafer with the first test chips for the processor. Lake Arrow from Intel, targeting the client PC market in 2024. The Intel 20A will be the first processor node to include PowerVia, Intel rear power technology and a new gate-all-around transistor design called RibbonFET. The Intel 18A, which also uses PowerVia and RibbonFET, is on track to be ready for production in the second half of 2024.

Another way Intel is pushing Moore’s Law is with new materials and new packaging technologies such as glass substrates, a development Intel announced this week. Glass substrates, to be introduced later this decade, will enable seamless scaling of transistors in a package to help meet the need for high-performance, data-intensive workloads such as artificial intelligence, and will maintain Moore’s Law beyond 2030.

Intel also demonstrated a test chip package built using Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe). The next wave of Moore’s Law will come with multi-chip packages, Gelsinger said, or sooner if open standards can reduce friction in IP integration. Created last year, the UCIe standard will allow chiplets from different manufacturers to work together, enabling new designs to scale different AI workloads. More than 120 companies support the open specification.

The test chip combined an Intel UCIe IP chiplet built on Intel 3 and a Synopsys UCIe IP chiplet built on TSMC’s N3E process node. The chips are connected using advanced EMIB (integrated multi-dies interconnect bridge) packaging technology. The demonstration highlights the commitment of TSMC, Synopsys and Intel Foundry Services to support an open standards-based chiplet ecosystem with UCIe.

Increase performance and expand AI everywhere

In addition, Gelsinger highlighted the range of AI technologies currently available to developers on Intel platforms and how they will increase dramatically over the next year.

The recent MLPerf AI derivation results further reinforce Intel’s commitment to address every phase of the AI ​​continuum, including the largest and most challenging generative AI and large language models. The results also highlight the accelerator Intel Gaudi2 as the only viable alternative on the market for AI computing needs. Gelsinger announced that the large AI supercomputer will be built exclusively with Intel Xeon processors and 4,000 Intel Gaudi2 AI hardware accelerators, with Stability AI as the primary customer.

Zhou Jingren, CTO of Alibaba Cloud, explained how Alibaba uses 4th generation Intel Intel technology, which he noted results in “a remarkable improvement in response time with an average speedup of 3x.”1

Intel also introduced the next generation of Intel Xeon processors, revealing that the 5th generation of Intel® was launched on December 14th. With E-core efficiency and arriving in the first half of 2024, Sierra Forest will offer 2.5 times the rack density and 2.4 times the power per watt of 4th generation Xeons, and will include a 288-core version2. And Granite Rapids with P core performance will closely follow the launch of Sierra Forest and offer 2 to 3 times better AI performance compared to 4th generation Xeon2.

Looking ahead to 2025, the next generation E-core Xeon, codenamed Clearwater Forest, will arrive on Intel’s 18A processor node.

Introducing AI-powered PCs through Intel Core Ultra processors

AI is also about to get more personal. “AI will fundamentally transform, reshape and restructure computing, unleashing greater personal productivity and creativity through the power of the cloud and computer collaboration,” said Gelsinger. “We’re heralding a new era of PCs with AI.”

This new computing experience comes with the upcoming Intel Core Ultra processors, codenamed Meteor Lake, which feature Intel’s first integrated Neural Processing Unit, or NPU, for AI acceleration and local inference from the PC that saves power. Gelsinger confirmed that the Core Ultra processors will also launch on December 14th.

Core Ultra represents a milestone in Intel’s client processor roadmap as it is the first client chip design enabled by Foveros packaging technology. In addition to the NPU and significant advances in energy efficiency thanks to Intel 4 process technology, the new processor offers discrete graphics performance with integrated Intel Arc graphics.

At the presentation, Gelsinger demonstrated a number of new use cases for PCs with artificial intelligence, and Jerry Kao, Acer’s COO, offered a preview of Acer’s upcoming Core Ultra notebook. “Together with the Intel teams, we developed the Acer AI application suite to take advantage of the Intel Core Ultra platform,” Kao explained, “we developed with the OpenVINO toolkit and co-developed AI libraries to bring the hardware.”

Siliconomics for developers

According to Gelsinger, “AI will need to offer more access, scalability, visibility, transparency and trust to the entire ecosystem in the future.” To help developers unlock this future, Intel announced:

Intel Developer Cloud General availability: Intel Developer Cloud helps developers accelerate AI using Intel’s latest hardware and software innovations—including Intel Gaudi2 processors for deep learning—and provides access to the latest Intel hardware platforms, such as 5th generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors and Intel® Data Center Max. 1100 and 1550 series GPUs.

Using Intel Developer Cloud, developers can build, test and optimize AI and HPC applications. They can also run small and large AI training, model optimization and inference tasks that are deployed with performance and efficiency. Intel Developer Cloud is built on an open software foundation with oneAPI – a multi-architecture and multi-vendor open programming model – providing hardware choice and freedom from proprietary programming models to support accelerated computing and hardware reuse and portability.

Intel OpenVINO Toolkit Distribution Version 2023.1: OpenVINO is an Intel runtime for AI deployment and inference for developers on client and edge platforms. The release includes pre-trained models optimized for integration into various operating systems and cloud solutions, including many generative AI models such as Meta’s Llama 2 model.

At the event, companies like ai.io and Fit:match demonstrated how they are using OpenVINO to accelerate their applications: ai.io to evaluate the performance of any potential athlete; Fit:match is revolutionizing the retail and wellness industry by helping consumers find the best fit.

Project Strata and native software platform development: The platform will launch in 2024 with modular blocks, premium services and support offerings. It is a horizontal approach to scaling the infrastructure needed for intelligent edge and hybrid AI and will bring together an ecosystem of vertical applications from Intel and third parties. The solution will enable developers to build, deploy, operate, manage, connect and secure distributed infrastructure and applications.