PC users could find that their next  processor includes an AI upgrade. Intel claims that their Vision Processing Units (VPUs) could find their way into every Meteor Lake chip.

These claims were made at Computex 2023 in Taiwan yesterday.

The VPU was first introduced with the 13th Gen Raptor Lake processors, but only on a few select models. The company are stating these will now come on every Meteor Lake chip which are set to launch at the end of this year.

Intel’s idea is simply just move AI processing, which already occurs on CPU and GPU, to a dedicated processor.

Intel claims over 100 apps are leveraging AI on CPU or GPU, including Adobe Suite, Microsoft Teams, Avid Pro Tools, xSplit, Zoom, and Unreal Engine.

The dedicated VPU is expected to be more power-efficient to save battery life, but allowing users to run more complex AI models.

Intel believes background replacement is 10x more complex, and dynamic noise suppression is 50x more complex today compared to 2021.

Along with these effects, Intel claims the VPU will offer 10x the AI computational power of running them on CPU with only a 5th of the power.

This has been focused on laptops, however Intel are discussing power density with the VPU, bringing out possibly more efficient designs, and more powerful dedicated AI processors, if there happen to be enough applications leveraging them.

This being said, Intel does not want all the work to be on the VPU. The GPU is still ideal for media creation tasks involving AI, and the CPU is able to handle simpler tasks requiring very low latency.

This dedicated processor can also improve overall performance. A demonstration showed the VPU analysing footage to create a mesh on a virtual avatar. The GPU usually does this, but by moving it to the VPU, the GPU is open to handle other processing.

Nvidia’s Broadcast uses AI processors on RTX graphics cards for background blur, auto reframing, and eye contact features. By moving these to the VPU, the graphics cards are free for higher performance in games.

AMD Ryzen 7000 mobile processors are also featuring an AI processor, called Ryzen AI. It is expected to have similar applications as Intel’s VPU but there have no details released on the capabilities.

There are rumours Intel’s Meteor Lake may entirely skip desktop. and AMD have yet to include Ryzen AI to their desktop processors. It seems both companies are focusing attention on laptops.