Intel Demonstrates Meteor Lake Processor For The First Time


Intel has given a choose group of journalists, together with Tweakers, a primary demonstration of a Meteor Lake processor. These processors will probably be obtainable for laptops later this 12 months and embody a neural processing unit, which Intel confirmed at work in a pre-production laptop computer.

Render of an Intel Meteor Lake processor

The operation of the Meteor Lake chip and particularly the npu was demonstrated within the generative AI program Steady Diffusion, which confirmed the generated pictures immediately in GIMP by way of a plug-in. With a two-line immediate and unfavourable immediate, producing a 512×512 pixel picture took twenty seconds. In accordance with the chip producer, if the software program solely used the CPU and GPU, it will have taken ‘for much longer’ and would even have consumed far more energy.

The built-in npu makes use of an additional developed know-how from Movidius, which was acquired by Intel in 2016. In 2017, an AI accelerator with that know-how grew to become obtainable as enlargement module in USB stick format. The npu will probably be appropriate with the Onnx, DirectML, W3C WNN and OpenVino requirements. In accordance with Intel, the npu is especially appropriate for taking up long-term AI workloads. For brief-term duties, the CPU would stay the processor of alternative; for AI functions in media or render pipelines, that continues to be the gpu. Enabling the npu additionally brings one thing latency with him. For a small job, this doesn’t outweigh the additional computing energy.

Previous to the demonstration, which befell in Taipei on the eve of the Computex commerce present, Intel confirmed that Meteor Lake and its successor Arrow Lake tiles, or chiplets exist. A few of these tiles are produced by Intel itself. The npu is a part of the SoC tile. Nonetheless, the GPU tile, amongst different issues, is produced by TSMC. An Intel spokesperson confirmed to Tweakers that the GPU tile is similar to a low-end Arc GPU. That is in all probability the A380 with 128 execution modelsthough it’s apparent that the igpu model will probably be a bit slower on account of decrease clock speeds.

Though Intel wouldn’t affirm the remainder of the specs of the processor proven, it’s in all probability a chip with six P-cores, eight E-cores and an extra two E-cores that aren’t a part of the on ‘Intel 4’ produced compute tile, however are within the SoC tile similar to the npu. These cores are in keeping with dependable rumours much more economical than the common E-cores and would stay lively when the system is in related standby stands. This might permit the compute tile itself to be fully deactivated in sleep mode to save lots of energy.

In regards to the Meteor Lake processors for desktops, these in keeping with latest rumours have been largely canceled, Intel declined to say something but. Additionally to questions concerning the potential model change to ‘Core Extremely’ the corporate did not wish to lose something. It guarantees to offer extra readability concerning the latter within the coming months, earlier than Meteor Lake comes available on the market.