Intel CEO thanks TSMC for new flagship AI processor

Taipei, June 4 (CNA) Intel Chief Executive Officer Pat Gelsinger on Tuesday thanked Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) for helping his company with some of the "core technologies" necessary to develop Intel's latest processor, codenamed Lunar Lake, which he unveiled at Computex the same day.

Lunar Lake is designed to be used in AI PCs, or artificial intelligence-powered personal computers, and represents the "next step forward" for Intel, boasting 48 tera operations per second (TOPS), an improved graphics processing unit (GPU) design, and greater power efficiency, Gelsinger said in his keynote speech at the Computex trade show in Taipei.

Gelsinger extended a "special thanks" to TSMC, which was "critical" to helping his company with many core technologies required to make Lunar Lake possible.

"This was a great example of the collaboration that we see in the foundry industry with Intel and TSMC and enabling new standards like UCIe (Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express) as well," Gelsinger said.

According to Intel, Lunar Lake will deliver up to 40% lower system on chip (SoC) power and more than three times the AI computing performance compared with its predecessor Meteor Lake.

Currently, Intel already has over 80 designs powered by Lunar Lake with 20 original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), which will start shipping in volume in Q3, Gelsinger said.

Jason Chen (陳俊聖), chairman of Acer -- one of Intel's partners -- was invited by Gelsinger to the stage to discuss the advantages of AI PCs.

With the advent of neural processing units (NPUs), people are developing applications using NPU in tandem with GPU and core processing units, which could be applied in areas such as customer service and healthcare, he said.

Chen also noted that with the NPU coming into play, there has also been a shift in user habits in that the traditional "search" function is starting to be replaced by an "ask" function.

This new development marks the first time that computers are adapting to people rather than people having to learn about computers, as was the case in the past, Chen said.

Also introduced by Gelsinger at Computex was the Xeon 6 processor for data centers. The Intel boss went on to reveal that the company's Gaudi 2 and Gaudi 3 accelerator kits will be priced at US$65,000 and US$125,000, respectively.

The Xeon 6 is 4.2 times more efficient at media transcoding than a 2nd-gen Xeon processor and is 2.6 times more power efficient than the previous model, according to Gelsinger.