When Intel launched its all-new Meteor Lake CPUs in late 2023, it announced the era of the AI PC had arrived. That's because it has dedicated AI hardware baked into it, and AMD is doing the same with its newest CPUs. Therefore, the race for AI dominance in the CPU world has officially begun, and now Intel is claiming it will achieve a 5X increase in AI performance in the coming years. This signifies that AI performance may become critical when considering a CPU's overall performance.
The announcement about Intel's AI ambitions came in the company's most recent earnings call and was delivered by CEO Pat Gelsinger. On the call, via Tom's Hardware, he stated that this year's Arrow Lake desktop and Lunar Lake mobile platforms will offer triple the AI performance of Meteor Lake. Those platforms will then be followed up in 2025 by Panther Lake on desktop, which will add another 2X uplift for AI. This is the first time we can recall Gelsinger mentioning the AI performance of upcoming platforms on an earnings call, highlighting how important this metric has become for the company's future.
On the call, Gelsinger described the company's plans. "The Core Ultra platform [Meteor Lake] delivers leadership AI performance today with our next-generation platforms launching later this year, Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake tripling our AI performance. In 2025 with Panther Lake, we will grow AI performance up to an additional 2x." Intel is banking on the "AI PC" becoming a new mainstay in the computer world; as he also said on the call, Intel expects to ship 40 million "AI PCs" in 2024. Generally speaking, the industry ships around 60 million PCs each quarter, so 40 million in a year is a solid start.
It remains to be seen how actual home users will be utilizing AI in their daily lives at some point and how dedicated AI hardware will make that better or different. Intel is touting new features in Zoom for blurry backgrounds and effects in visual apps from Adobe. However, it's still too early to see if these applications will make our lives easier. There will be clear benefits for business and enterprise, but we're still waiting to see how this will benefit off-the-shelf PCs. Intel says embedded AI hardware will allow us to run LLMs with 10 billion parameters locally instead of from the cloud, making AI assistants like Windows Copilot much faster.
Regardless, the AI wars have officially begun, as both Intel and AMD are starting to tout their CPUs' AI prowess. 2024 is also being described as the "year of the AI PC" by analysts, and it'll likely be in full effect when the next version of Windows arrives later this year as well. Microsoft is rumored to be considering launching a new version of Windows in June, when you can buy a pre-built AI PC with hardware that supports it from both Intel and AMD.
