The AI PC era is about to begin.
Artificial Intelligence PC Era Begins: The Battle between "Edge" and "Cloud" Intensifies?
On Friday, Intel released its latest earnings report, returning to profitability in the second quarter and surpassing expectations for both performance and third-quarter guidance. During the subsequent conference call, Intel CEO Gelsinger focused on "AI PCs," stating that Intel plans to integrate AI into every product it manufactures.
Later this year, Intel will launch Meteor Lake, its first consumer-grade chip with an integrated neural processor designed for machine learning tasks. There are reports that Intel's Meteor Lake will support the Windows 12 operating system.
Gelsinger mentioned that AI does not necessarily rely on cloud technology, as cloud computing is not suitable for all customers and applications. Many tasks can only be completed on the client side.
For various use cases related to consumers, developers, and enterprise efficiency, we see a range of AI capabilities being implemented. These capabilities will be customer-centric and deployed on edge devices.
You can't round-trip to the cloud. You don't have the latency, bandwidth, or cost structure to go back to the cloud. For example, you can't send inference calculations from a local convenience store back to the cloud. All of this will happen on edge devices and clients.
In the future, AI will be present in every hearing aid, including mine. Whether it's edge platforms for retail, manufacturing, and industrial use cases, or enterprise data centers, they won't build dedicated 10-megawatt cloud farms.
Analysis suggests that Intel made these statements because, on the one hand, NVIDIA is currently the leading chip manufacturer for cloud AI technology. NVIDIA has made a fortune by selling chips during the AI gold rush, and its market value has soared to $1 trillion. Therefore, Intel needs to find its own path. On the other hand, not all customers want everything to be done in the cloud, including cloud service provider Microsoft, which still earns substantial profits by selling Windows PC licenses.