AI is really interfering in all areas of computing, and especially in processors. Intel has just confirmed that its next consumer processors, the Meteor Lake, will put machine learning to good use.
Intel announced it in its roadmap last year: the Meteor Lake processors that will be released by the end of October or in 2024 will use AI to accelerate their performance. According to PC World, “ the Meteor Lake will use AI as part of energy management and the transition between active states and low power states”.
That said, the company’s new chips will only be not smart enough to analyze our habits in real time. They have in fact been trained on different standard scenarios and use them to define a energy envelope to be allocated to each of our actions. This will make it more energy efficient and could thus increase the autonomy of our laptops by 15%. This gain in autonomy does not mean that the PC will be less responsive. On the contrary, according to Efraim Rotem, head of consumer SoCs at Intel, Meteor Lake will be 35% more vivid than its predecessors.
According to Intel, the Meteor Lake will be 15% less greedy and 35% more reactive
Still on the subject of energy efficiency, Mr. Rotem concluded his presentation at the Hot Chip conference by stating thatit’s time to ditch the units of measurement we currently use. “Performance per watt, a key metric for low-power architectures like ARM, no longer matters,” he said.
Whatever he says, for a few years now, Intel has been far behind the competition from Snapdragon and especially Apple Silicon, at least in terms of autonomy. While a 16” MacBook Pro claims 22 hours of use without needing to be recharged, the most enduring PCs with Intel processors, the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 and X1 Nano, barely last 14 hours. It is therefore high time for the Santa Clara firm to react and demonstrate its leadership. In this sense, the Intel Innovation conference which will take place on September 19 next should be instructive.