Intel Core Ultra Shows Its AI Magic, Runs Over 500 Models Optimized

Intel’s Core Ultra CPUs have brought tremendous AI capabilities through its NPU, as they manage to run over 500 AI models on a single machine.

Intel Showcases The Capabilities Of Core Ultra’s Dedicated NPUs, Manages To Operate Hundreds Of AI Models

[Press Release]: Today, Intel announced it surpassed 500 AI models running optimized on new Intel Core Ultra processors – the industry’s premier AI PC processor available in the market today, featuring new AI experiences, immersive graphics, and optimal battery life. This significant milestone is a result of Intel’s investment in client AI, the AI PC transformation, framework optimizations, and AI tools including OpenVINO toolkit.

The 500 models, which can be deployed across the central processing unit (CPU), graphics processing unit (GPU), and neural processing unit (NPU), are available across popular industry sources, including OpenVINO Model Zoo, Hugging Face, ONNX Model Zoo and PyTorch. The models draw from categories of local AI inferencing, including large language, diffusion, super-resolution, object detection, image classification/segmentation, computer vision, and others.

Why It Matters: Surpassing 500 AI models is a landmark moment for Intel’s efforts to nurture and support the AI PC transformation. Not only is the Intel Core Ultra processor the fastest-growing AI PC processor to date — selling more units in a single quarter than competing processors in all of 2023 — it is also the most robust platform for AI PC development, with more AI models, frameworks and runtimes enabled than any other processor vendor.

Models form the backbone of AI-enhanced software features like object removal, image super-resolution, or text summarization. There is a direct link between the number of enabled/optimized models and the breadth of user-facing AI features that can be brought to market. Without a model, the feature cannot be designed. Without runtime optimization, the feature cannot reach its best performance.

How AI Models Work: AI models are one of many critical layers in the software stack that determine the ultimate performance, stability, and capabilities of an AI-driven application. AI models are trained to analyze large quantities of data, draw conclusions, and take actions based on such inferences. Developers creating new AI PC features can utilize these models and build on them. The more AI models there are, the more AI PC features are enabled.

AI models can act on text, speech, audio, images, and other audiovisual sources common to the PC experience. AI models form the foundation of AI-enhanced features developed for users to enjoy, such as automatic text summarization, reducing energy consumption during teleconferencing, or removing unwanted objects from a picture. OpenVINO optimizes for Intel Core Ultra by load-balancing across all the compute units, compressing the models to run efficiently in an AI PC, and optimizing the runtime to take advantage of memory bandwidth and core architecture within Intel Core Ultra.

Continuous efforts to enable an unmatched set of high-performance models on Intel Core Ultra offer a wide field of innovation for software developers and simplify the delivery of AI PC applications and features to users.

About Additional Features and Benefits: Features and benefits of the more than 500 optimized AI models:

• Facilitates development and deployment.
• Spans more than 20 categories of AI, including large language, diffusion, super-resolution, object detection, and computer vision.
• Includes Phi-2, Mistral, Llama, Bert, Whisper, and Stable Diffusion 1.5.
• Improves system stability, reliability, and performance.