Meteor Lake CPU in a first “public” demo
Intel is showing off the upcoming Meteor Lake mobile platform during Computex.
Intel Meteor Lake is a next-gen client CPU featuring a disaggregated chiplet design. One of the dies is a VPU (Versatile Processing Unit), which is an AI processor based on 3rd generation technology from Movidius, a company Intel acquired in 2016.
The company sees an opportunity in scaling up AI acceleration on a client platform. Today’s disclosure is the first showcase of Meteor Lake’s AI core capabilities and announcement of which companies are now working with Intel to take advantage of this low-power AI core.
One of the most basic features for the Meteor Lake VPU will be real-time video editing and filtering. This includes blur effects, background replacement, eye-contact feature (presumably similar to NVIDIA Broadcast Eye Contact) or gesture recognition. The AI core has enough power even to capture motion for Unreal Engine.
Meteor Lake VPU (AI core) features, Source: Intel
However, the VPU core will be just powerful enough to enable generative AI experiences, such as Stable Diffusion support. Of course, those AI models can run on anything with enough memory, but it is the CPU/GPU/APU acceleration that makes this process significantly faster. Intel is working with companies like GIMP and Adobe to deliver those experiences on a client Meteor Lake VPU, and judging from the demo were on a mobile platform.
Meteor Lake VPU (AI core) features, Source: Intel
And speaking of the demos, Intel has showcased its Meteor Lake CPU (listed as Intel 0000) with 16 cores and 22 threads. According to Wccftech, who were present during the demonstration, this would be the 6+8+2 CPU config of a Meteor Lake-P mobile CPU. This unusual configuration refers to Performance and Efficient cores in on a CPU die and on a SoC (this die will have 2 dedicated cores).
The CPU was idling at 0.37 GHz and has a base clock of 3.1 GHz. The processor features 1.6MB of L1 cache, 18MB of L2 cache and 24 MB of L3.
Meteor Lake-P with 16 cores during Intel demo, Source: Intel
The actual demo shows the Stable Diffusion for GIMP and later a super-resolution plugin, both based on OpenVINO Intel deep learning toolkit.
Intel Meteor Lake is now expected to launch by the end of this year for laptops. The company hasn’t commented on reports that Meteor Lake-S was canceled, but it’s possible that such processors will be released. What may also be important to note is that VPU will be available on all Meteor Lake CPUs, including the supposed desktop “F” variants which usually lack integrated graphics support.
Source: HardwareLuxx, ComputerBase
