Today, Intel announced during its Intel Innovation 2023 developers conference, that its first Core Ultra CPUs, which include an AI-based neural processing unit (NPU), will officially launch on December 14.
Intel previously announced it would be rebranding its CPUs with new Core and Core Ultra branding, ditching the "i" brand in the process. In a press release, the company offered up some more details on these chips, which have been described under its "Meteor Lake" code name in the past.
Intel stated:
Core Ultra integrates an NPU into client silicon for the first time. The NPU is built to enable low power and high quality and provide entirely new PC experiences. It is ideal for workloads migrating from the CPU that need higher quality or efficiency, or for workloads that would typically run in the cloud due to lack of efficient client compute.
Core UItra chips will also include an integrated Intel Arc GPU which will have "performance parallelism and throughput, ideal for AI infused in media, 3D applications and the render pipeline." Intel says that the Core Ultra chip is the first to use its Foveros packaging technology.
Intel also announced plans to launch new 5th generation Xeon processors on December 14 as well. The company said that the new data center CPUs will offer better performance and faster memory compared to earlier models, but will still use the same amount of energy. The company demoed a single 5th Gen Xeon running ChatGPT on the cloud which sounds pretty impressive.
The company also announced the general availability of the Intel Developer Cloud. It"s designed to help developers test high end computing applications and AI services. It stated:
The cloud development environment also provides access to the latest Intel hardware platforms, such as 5th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors (code-named Emerald Rapids), which will become available in the Intel Development Cloud in the next few weeks and launch on Dec. 14, and Intel Data Center GPU Max Series 1100 and 1550.
Intel also briefly showed off an AI demo of its upcoming Lunar Lake CPUs on state at the keynote event which are currently scheduled to launch in late 2024 or early 2025.