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Intel to Add AI Engine to All 14th-gen Meteor Lake SoCs

upstart writes:

Intel to add AI engine to all 14th-gen Meteor Lake SoCs:

Computex Intel will use the "VPU" tech it acquired along with Movidius in 2016 to all models of its forthcoming Meteor Lake client CPUs.

[...] Curiously, Intel didn't elucidate the acronym, but has previously said it stands for Vision Processing Unit. Chipzilla is, however, clear about what it does and why it's needed – and it's more than vision.

Intel Veep and general manager of Client AI John Rayfield said dedicated AI silicon is needed because AI is now present in many PC workloads. Video conferences, he said, feature lots of AI enhancing video and making participants sounds great – and users now just expect that PCs do brilliantly when Zooming or WebExing or Teamising. Games use lots of AI. And GPT-like models, and tools like Stable Diffusion, are already popular on the PC and available as local executables.

CPUs and GPUs do the heavy lifting today, but Rayfield said they'll be overwhelmed by the demands of AI workloads.

Shifting that work to the cloud is pricey, and also impractical because buyers want PCs to perform.

Meteor Lake therefore gets VPUs and emerges as an SoC that uses Intel's Foveros packaging tech to combine the CPU, GPU, and VPU.

The VPU gets to handle "sustained AI and AI offload." CPUs will still be asked to do simple inference jobs with low latency, usually when the cost of doing so is less than the overhead of working with a driver to shunt the workload elsewhere. GPUs will get to do jobs involving performance parallelism and throughput. Other AI-related work will be offloaded to VPUs.

Intel Demos Meteor Lake's AI Acceleration for PCs, Details VPU Unit

upstart writes:

Intel Demos Meteor Lake's AI Acceleration for PCs, Details VPU Unit:

[...] Intel will still include the Gaussian Neural Acceleration low-power AI acceleration block that already exists on its chips, marked as 'GNA 3.5' on the SoC tile in the diagram (more on this below). You can also spot the 'VPU 2.7' block that comprises the new Movidius-based VPU block.

Like Intel's stylized render, the patent image is also just a graphical rendering with no real correlation to the actual physical size of the dies. It's easy to see that with so many external interfaces, like the memory controllers, PCIe, USB, and SATA, not to mention the media and display engines and power management, that the VPU cores simply can't consume much of the die area on the SoC tile. For now, the amount of die area that Intel has dedicated to this engine is unknown.

The VPU is designed for sustained AI workloads, but Meteor Lake also includes a CPU, GPU, and GNA engine that can run various AI workloads. Intel's Intel says the VPU is primarily for background tasks, while the GPU steps in for heavier parallelized work. Meanwhile, the CPU addresses light low-latency inference work. Some AI workloads can also run on both the VPU and GPU simultaneously, and Intel has enabled mechanisms that allow developers to target the different compute layers based on the needs of the application at hand. This will ultimately result in higher performance at lower power -- a key goal of using the AI acceleration VPU.

Intel's chips currently use the GNA block for low-power AI inference for audio and video processing functions, and the GNA unit will remain on Meteor Lake. However, Intel says it is already running some of the GNA-focused code on the VPU and achieving better results, with a heavy implication that Intel will transition to the VPU entirely with future chips and remove the GNA engine.

Intel also disclosed that Meteor Lake has a coherent fabric that enables a unified memory subsystem, meaning it can easily share data among the compute elements. This is a key functionality that is similar in concept to other contenders in the CPU AI space, like Apple with its M-series and AMD's Ryzen 7040 chips.

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