Intel comes out swinging as AI PC market explodes

If the big chipmakers used last year’s Computex to strut their AI stuff, this year’s edition of the Taiwan tech trade show has been a full-blown dance-off. And while much of the focus is still on data-center AI chips, this time the battle for the AI PC is also very much on.

To set the scene, a couple weeks ago Microsoft announced the new category of “Copilot+ PC” that would be able to comfortably run generative AI models locally on the machine, rather than relying on the cloud. And Qualcomm was the star of the show, with its Arm-based Snapdragon X Elite chipsets powering the first wave of announced Copilot+ laptops. These processors promise great power and power efficiency that should make Windows machines competitive with Apple’s recent Arm-based MacBooks, which have owned the market for portable, powerful, and long-lasting laptops in recent years.

So, game over for the x86 architecture that has traditionally powered PCs? Not if Intel has anything to say about it.

Microsoft’s longtime Windows partner came out swinging today, with CEO Pat Gelsinger using his Computex appearance to stake Intel’s claim to at least part of our AI-imbued future. “Intel is one of the only companies in the world innovating across the full spectrum of the AI market opportunity—from semiconductor manufacturing to PC, network, edge, and data center systems,” Gelsinger said, reflecting Intel’s current racing-to-stay-in-the-race reality (the company has been blindsided by Nvidia's rise in the AI data center.)

Gelsinger promoted Intel’s upcoming Gaudi 3 AI accelerator chips, which he said would be a cheaper alternative to Nvidia’s market-leading H100s. But the really big Intel announcement was that of its Lunar Lake laptop architecture, which will make its way into PCs later this year.

Lunar Lake is Intel’s second crack at an AI PC platform. Last year’s Meteor Lake was Intel’s first stab at incorporating an AI-focused neural processing unit (NPU) à la Apple. But if you were an Intel AI PC early adopter, I regret to inform you that Meteor Lake-based laptops are now officially weak sauce, after Microsoft said last month that all Copilot+ PCs will have to be able to manage at least 40 trillion operations per second (TOPS) of NPU performance.

Meteor Lake can only eke out 11.5 TOPS at its peak, but the Lunar Lake NPU can manage 48 TOPS—and if you look at combined NPU and CPU and GPU performance, the top of the line Lunar Lake PC will be able to achieve 120 TOPS. Lunar Lake also promises 60% more battery life than Meteor Lake. “It’s x86 power like you’ve never seen it before,” Intel technical marketer Rob Hallock told The Verge, boasting that Lunar Lake would “definitely” beat Qualcomm’s offerings.

The urgency of Intel’s desire to stay competitive in the AI PC race isn’t just demonstrated by the speed at which it’s released a significantly redesigned successor to Meteor Lake—it’s also clear from the fact that Intel has turned to Taiwan's TSMC to make the key compute and controller components of its Lunar Lake chipset.

This is a very big shift for a company that has always made its own processors, and it’s not exactly a ringing endorsement of Intel’s Foundry chipmaking operations, which it recently separated from the design operation that produced Lunar Lake. But in Gelsinger's words: “Lunar Lake picked TSMC as the right technology at that point in time.” The next generation, Panther Lake, will almost all be made in Intel’s own factories, but right now keeping up means swallowing pride—this is how Intel gets to promise the release of 80 Intel-based Copilot+ PCs this year, from 20 manufacturers.

Meanwhile, AMD’s Lisa Su also used Computex to announce x86-based Copilot+ PC chips—the Ryzen AI 300 Series, with an NPU offering 50 TOPS. So expect to see loads of PCs with those inside too, from the likes of Lenovo, Acer, Asus, and HP. Heck, if you’re not too bothered about achieving the sort of performance offered by an official Copilot+ PC, chipmaker Hailo has even just announced a $70, 13 TOPS-capable AI accelerator add-on for the cheap-and-cheerful Raspberry Pi microcomputer. It remains to be seen to what degree everyone actually uses the AI capabilities being build into their computers right now, but this market just exploded.

More news below. And by the way, if you want to hear Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon’s thoughts on the AI PC sector, he’ll be one of the speakers at Fortune Brainstorm Tech next month in Park City, Utah—details here. Oh, and check out the latest Fortune 500 list, which just dropped.

David Meyer

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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com