Intel unveiled next-gen chips designed to power AI applications, including an updated Gaudi3 AI accelerator.

Intel has been working to recapture the technological lead from TSMC and AMD, taking the opportunity Thursday to unveil its next-gen chips. Unsurprisingly, the company’s announcement focused heavily on AI.

“AI innovation is poised to raise the digital economy’s impact up to as much as one-third of global gross domestic product,” CEO Pat Gelsinger said. “Intel is developing the technologies and solutions that empower customers to seamlessly integrate and effectively run AI in all their applications — in the cloud and, increasingly, locally at the PC and edge, where data is generated and used.”

“Intel is on a mission to bring AI everywhere through exceptionally engineered platforms, secure solutions and support for open ecosystems. Our AI portfolio gets even stronger with today’s launch of Intel Core Ultra ushering in the age of the AI PC and AI-accelerated 5th Gen Xeon for the enterprise,” Gelsinger added.

A sneak peak at the upcoming Gaudi3 AI accelerator was a highlight of the announcement.

Wrapping up the event, Gelsinger provided an update on Intel Gaudi3, coming next year. He showed for the first time the next-generation AI accelerator for deep learning and large-scale generative AI models. Intel has seen a rapid expansion of its Gaudi pipeline due to growing and proven performance advantages combined with highly competitive TCO and pricing. With increasing demand for generative AI solutions, Intel expects to capture a larger portion of the accelerator market in 2024 with its suite of AI accelerators led by Gaudi.

The company’s other chip lines, including the Intel Core Ultra, also received AI upgrades.

Intel Core Ultra features Intel’s first client on-chip AI accelerator — the neural processing unit, or NPU — to enable a new level of power-efficient AI acceleration with 2.5x better power efficiency than the previous generation2. Its world-class GPU and leadership CPU are each also capable of speeding up AI solutions.

Intel touted its Xeon line as the only “the only mainstream data center processor with built-in AI acceleration.”

Xeon’s built-in AI accelerators, together with optimized software and enhanced telemetry capabilities, enable more manageable and efficient deployments of demanding network and edge workloads for communication service providers, content delivery networks and broad vertical markets, including retail, healthcare and manufacturing.

During today’s event, IBM announced that 5th Gen Intel Xeon processors achieved up to 2.7x better query throughput on its watsonx.data platform compared to previous-generation Xeon processors during testing.

Intel is clearly working hard to regain its crown as the leading chipmaker, betting on AI to help it do so.