Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger flashed a Lunar Lake processor, the company's next-gen laptop chip, at its Vision 2024 event, saying the chip provides 100+ TOPS of performance in AI workloads, with 45 of those TOPS coming from the NPU alone. That's 3X the AI performance of Intel's current-gen chips and meets the bar of 45 TOPS from the NPU that the company recently discussed during its AI Summit in Taipei as the requirement for next-gen AI PCs. At that event, Intel executives, in a question-and-answer session with Tom's Hardware, also said that elements of Microsoft's Copilot will soon run locally on Windows PCs.
Intel's current-gen Meteor Lake chips only provide 10 TOPS of performance from the NPU, falling below the bar for next-gen AI PCs. Lunar Lake's 45 TOPS from the NPU meets that bar exactly. Gelsinger didn't elaborate on how much of the remaining 55+ TOPS comes from the CPU and GPU, but it's reasonable to expect in the range of 50 TOPS from the GPU and 5 to 10 FLOPS from the CPU cores.
AMD's current-gen Ryzen Hawk Point platform has an NPU with 16 TOPS of performance, which also falls below the bar for next-gen AI PCs. However, the company recently sent us a statement regarding its next-gen products:
“We believe an AI PC requires strong CPU, GPU and NPU engines, which is what AMD has been delivering for more than a year with our Ryzen 7040 and now 8040 Series. At our December Advancing AI event, we disclosed our next-gen “Strix Point” mobile processors with XDNA 2 architecture would have up to 3x the generative AI performance of the current generation. We believe this performance will position us to remain the leading choice for next-gen AI PCs." — AMD representative to Tom's Hardware.
AMD wouldn't elaborate further and break out the amount of performance delivered from each unit, but simple math puts AMD's Strix Point NPU at 48 TOPS if NPU performance triples.
Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite chips are the elephant in the room — these Arm chips will debut with 45 TOPS of performance from its NPU (75 TOPS total) in the "middle of the year," setting up a tight race between Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm for the lead in the next generation of AI PCs.
Intel appears to have a running start with its Core Ultra Meteor Lake chips. Gelsinger says the company has already shipped five million AI PCs to date and plans to ship 40 million units by the end of the year. That's a solid start towards the company's goal of shipping 100 million AI PC chips by the end of 2025.
