As Intel faces more competition than ever, the chip maker is betting that AI-capable PCs will help drive the company’s growth.
Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger mentioned the “AI PC” push in an earnings call on Thursday as the company projects the PC market is on the road to recovery following a year of falling demand.
“Importantly, we see the AI PC as a critical inflection point for the PC market over the coming years that will rival the importance of Centrino and Wi-Fi in the early 2000s,” Gelsinger said.
The Intel Centrino brand sprung up two decades ago right as wireless technology was becoming mainstream. Hence, Gelsinger says the industry is facing a similar moment with the rise of AI programs such as ChatGPT and image generators such as StableDiffusion.
Although many generative AI programs operate over the cloud, where a company’s data center runs the model for a website, Gelsinger sees PCs taking over some of the work. “You can't round trip to the cloud,” he said, noting features such as real-time language translation and AI-powered gaming environments need to occur locally on the PC.
Gelsinger added: "We do believe that this will become a driver of the TAM [total addressable market] because people will say, 'Oh, I want those new use cases. They make me more efficient and more capable, just like Centrino made me more efficient because I didn't have to plug into the wire, right? Now, I don't have to go to the cloud to get these use cases.'"
The chip maker plans on ushering in the AI PC era with its “Meteor Lake” chips, which will likely arrive in September. The same processors will use the company’s long-awaited Intel 4 manufacturing process, formerly known as 7-nanometer. Back in May, Intel demoed the chip to journalists, and showed it can run the AI image generator Stable Diffusion locally over a laptop.
Expect Intel to also bring AI capabilities to its other enterprise-focused chips. “We're going to build AI into every product that we build, whether it's a client, whether it's an edge platform for retail and manufacturing and industrial use cases,” Gelsinger added.