Meteor Lake client PC processor (Photo: Intel)

Intel and Microsoft Strengthen Collaboration to Provide AI-Enabled Features

The PC industry is at a critical inflection point. Intel and Microsoft have partnered to bring new AI-powered capabilities to the PC experience.

Intel and Microsoft (MS) announced on the 24th that they have unveiled the AI capabilities of Intel's next-generation PC processor, Meteor Lake, at Microsoft's annual developer conference, 'Microsoft Build 2023'.

Intel and Microsoft are collaborating to advance AI technology for PC users, leveraging Meteor Lake's unique distributed architecture to deliver new multimedia features, such as auto-reframe and scene editing detection in Premiere Pro, as well as more effective machine learning capabilities.

Meteor Lake is expected to revolutionize not only personal computing but also the way people interact with technology, and is said to bring power efficiency and AI capabilities to PCs. This is achieved through a chiplet system-on-chip (SoC) design that allows Intel to deliver highly sophisticated IP and leading processes tailored to its target markets.

This makes Meteor Lake the first Intel PC platform to feature a built-in neural network VPU, an AI engine integrated into the SoC to optimize power consumption and efficiently execute AI models. Meteor Lake combines the powerful AI accelerators in Intel's CPUs and GPUs, which have been supported across multiple product generations, with the new neural network VPU.

Furthermore, Intel and its PC partners will work together to accelerate the transformation of AI, with millions of Meteor Lake processors equipped with dedicated AI engines expected to ship next year. As this scale expands further with subsequent product generations, Intel expects hundreds of millions of people to enjoy AI-accelerated experiences, delivering the intelligent collaboration, processing speed, and capabilities needed to drive unprecedented change.

Amidst the accelerating AI ecosystem, Intel and Microsoft plan to collaborate with OEM and independent software vendor (ISV) partners to expand Meteor Lake and Windows 11 across the ecosystem. To achieve this goal, they have identified the developer community as a key player. Windows is the optimal platform for developers to deliver AI models to a massive audience.

With Meteor Lake as the foundation, developers can take advantage of: ONNX-Runtime support enabled via OpenVINO-EP and DirectML-EP; enhanced machine learning capabilities in WinML/DirectML for Neural VPU and GPU acceleration; and Microsoft Studio effects such as background blur, gaze auto-framing, and voice focus.

“We are excited to collaborate with Intel on AI as Meteor Lake will have such a massive impact on the Windows PC ecosystem,” said Pavan Davuluri, corporate vice president of Windows Silicon and Systems Integration at Microsoft. “Together, we will help developers leverage the ONNX Runtime and related toolchain to optimally run AI models on Windows platforms.”