Last week we learned that Meteor Lake, the future generation of Intel processors, will mark a before and after in terms of artificial intelligence. And it is that, according to what Intel and Microsoft told us during Build 2023, the fourteenth generation of Intel Core (waiting to know if it will receive such a name or not) will bring artificial intelligence computing to the desktop, by integrating a VPU (Visual Processing Unit, Vision Processing Unit), a key element for real-time image processing, and which allows the deployment of AI-based applications.
Less than a week has passed since then, and now Intel has taken advantage of the Computex 2023 celebration to show pretty much Meteor Lake, and what we can expect from this generation in relation to artificial intelligence. As we already told you last week, Intel will take advantage of the chiplet architecture for the integration of this new element, which uses Movidius technology, a company that it acquired seven years ago, in 2016, and which even then gave rise to Intel Movidius Myriad. , a proposal that won the MuyComputer 2017 award for the most disruptive technology.
To carry out this presentation, Intel has brought to Computex 2023 a working prototype of a Meteor Lake CPU, identified as Intel 0000, with 16 cores (6R+8E+2E, the latter in the SoC) and 22 threads. In tests by some attendees, Windows detected the VPU as a Movidius NPU (Neural Process Unit), the original technology from 2017, although Intel has clarified that the version built into Meteor Lake is based on that technology, but that the implementation The current one is three generations ahead of that one. This integrated has 1.6 megabytes of L1 cache, 18 megabytes of L2 cache and 24 megabytes of L3 cache, and its base frequency is 3.1 GHz.
The raison d’être of having brought this working prototype of Meteor Lake to the event is, of course, to be able to start show what systems with next generation CPUs will be able to offer from Intel, and in this regard we have already been able to 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 taking advantage of its support for artificial intelligence from the first moment.
Thus, the company has shown some slides, such as the one you can see in the upper paragraph, which indicates some effects applied in real time that will use the integrated VPU, and also shows the enormous difference in the need for computing power to carry out the same with and without this NPU. The new features mentioned are automatic framing (we can understand that based on facial tracking technology), eye contact simulation, gesture-based avatar animation, and gesture recognition.
These functions are not really something new, part of them can be found for example in NVIDIA Broadcast, which is based on the integrated ones of the three generations (20, 30 and 40) of NVIDIA RTX graphics cards. However, since the VPU will be integrated into all models of all Meteor Lake generation families, it does will serve to substantially expand the scopeand therefore accessibility, to them.
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