The other day, Intel revealed its 14th generation Meteor Lake processors for high-end laptops. One of the highlights of this presentation was the inclusion of the NPU (Neural Processing Unit) to help accelerate artificial intelligence workloads. It is worth remembering that at present, very few applications (almost none) support hardware acceleration of fixed neural network functions.
Regardless, because of this advantage, which is actually already available on AMD's Ryzen Phoenix laptops (the technical capabilities likely differ), Meteor Lake laptops will cost a pretty penny. The official launch date for Meteor Lake devices is December 2023, but most OEMs will release their offerings in the first half of 2024.
Prices for the first wave of 14th generation Meteor Lake laptops are expected to be quite high. According to MoneyUDN, these laptops will start at $1,550 (converted to Taiwan dollars). In retrospect, that's not really higher than the current price of high-end convertible computers.
The NPU of Meteor Lake processors can be used to accelerate the learning of neural networks. The first was Riffusion, an AI-powered music generation plugin for Audacity that can be trained to generate tracks similar to those of your favorite artist. Stable Diffusion was also used to demonstrate a model for generating text from images.
Acer will be the first OEM to market Meteor Lake laptops. It will integrate NPU functions into its own AI applications and release a set of AI-specific laptops. Generative AI is one of the “biggest” new things on the market, massively benefiting NVIDIA and its rivals. Now Intel and its partners are looking to get a piece of that pie.