Mint Explainer: Why Intel is betting on siliconomy, AI-enabled PCs

Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s co-founder, president and chief executive has been promoting ‘accelerated computing’, a term that blends central processing units (CPUs), GPUs and and other processors such as data processing units (DPUs) “together as equals in an architecture sometimes called heterogeneous computing". Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger meanwhile is pushing 'siliconomy', a term he coined, to describe "... an evolving economy enabled by the magic of silicon where semiconductors are essential to maintaining and enabling modern economies".

That said, while Nvidia is a fabless company that does not manufacture its own chips, Intel has its own foundries and makes its own chips. Nevertheless, both the terms mentioned above simply imply that AI is here to stay and that the companies designing or making chips will leave no stone unturned in grabbing a bigger slice of the AI cake.

The opportunity is huge. According to a 22 August note by research firm Gartner, semiconductors designed to execute AI workloads will represent a $53.4 billion revenue opportunity in 2023, an increase of 20.9% from 2022.

Alan Priestley, VP analyst at Gartner, attributes the growth to the developments in generative AI and the increasing use of a wide range AI-based applications in data centres, edge infrastructure and endpoint devices, which require high-performance GPUs and optimised semiconductor devices. Gartner predicts that AI semiconductor revenue may touch $67.1 billion in 2024 and $119.4 billion by 2027, which is more than double the size of the market in 2023.

Nvidia has been able to go beyond providing GPUs to just the gaming sector and leveraging GPU architecture to create platforms for scientific computing, autonomous vehicles, robotics, metaverse and 3D internet applications, among others. Nvidia's GPUs feed industries are equally varied, from airports to food and, of course, OpenAI's ChatGPT, which has become the poster child of generative AI.

Intel, for its part, has unveiled an array of technologies to make AI more accessible for individuals and companies, and for edge (closer to the user devices), network and cloud computing workloads. These will include AI-enabled Intel PCs that will ship in 2024. Intel’s portfolio of AI-enabling hardware and software includes CPUs, GPUs and accelerators, besides the oneAPI programming model, OpenVINO developer toolkit and libraries that empower the AI ecosystem. Developers can use the Intel Developer Cloud to build, test and optimize AI and high-performance computing applications. They can also run small- to large-scale AI training, model optimization and inference workloads, according to Intel.

“AI represents a generational shift, giving rise to a new era of global expansion where computing is even more foundational to a better future for all," said Gelsinger during his keynote at the Intel Innovation event. He added, “For developers, this creates massive societal and business opportunities to push the boundaries of what’s possible, to create solutions to the world’s biggest challenges and to improve the life of every person on the planet." Simultaneously, he underscored how AI is helping to drive the siliconomy, saying silicon feeds a $574-billion industry that in turn powers a global tech economy worth almost $8 trillion.

Intel has lost ground to its semiconductor manufacturing rival, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), which has helped its rivals AMD and Nvidia eat into its market share. Gelsinger, who began his career in 1979 at Intel, was to regain the company's foundry mojo. He was the architect of the original 80486 processor, led 14 microprocessor programs and played key roles in the Intel Core and Intel Xeon processor families.

According to Gelsinger, Intel's "five-nodes-in-four-years process development program is progressing well… with Intel 7 already in high-volume manufacturing, Intel 4 manufacturing-ready and Intel 3 on track for the end of this year". Intel is also readying its 18A (1.8 nanometer class) and 20A (2 nanometer class) process nodes to stave off the competition.

The company has already demonstrated its intent to push Moore’s Law forward with new materials and new packaging technologies such as glass substrates which, when released in the "second half of this decade", will allow for continued scaling of transistors on a package to help meet the need for data-intensive, high-performance workloads like AI and "keep Moore’s Law going well beyond 2030". Named after Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, the law predicts that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit (chip) will double every two years with minimal rise in cost.

According to Intel, glass offers distinctive properties such as "ultra-low flatness and better thermal and mechanical stability, resulting in much higher interconnect density in a substrate". A substrate is the base material of IC packages. Intel believes that these benefits will allow chip architects to create high-density, high-performance chip packages for data-intensive workloads such as AI.

Intel is also committed “to addressing every phase of the AI continuum," according to Gelsinger, who added that this includes generative AI and large language models (LLMs). During this keynote, Gelsinger announced that a large AI supercomputer will be built entirely on Intel Xeon processors and 4,000 Intel Gaudi2 AI hardware accelerators, with Dell as its partner (Gelsinger was CEO of VMware, a Dell unit, before joining Intel), and Stability AI as the anchor customer. Intel unit Habana’s first-generation Gaudi deep-learning processors are an alternative to GPUs. Intel also previewed its 5th Gen Intel Xeon processors, to be launched on 14 December, which it hopes will power the world’s data centres.

Intel is building AI PCs, too. “AI will fundamentally transform, reshape and restructure the PC experience – unleashing personal productivity and creativity through the power of the cloud and PC working together," Gelsinger said, adding, “We are ushering in a new age of the AI PC." The new AI PCs will sport Intel Core Ultra processors, code-named Meteor Lake, featuring Intel’s first integrated neural processing unit (NPU) "for power-efficient AI acceleration and local inference on the PC". Acer is already working on powering its laptops with Core Ultra processors, according to Jerry Kao, the company’s chief operating officer.

Intel, meanwhile, also demonstrated a laptop running a not-yet-released 15th Generation Core processor, codenamed Lunar Lake, while also speaking about the Panther Lake CPU that will be released after it.