Intel announced at its Innovation 2023 event the 14th generation Meteor Lake processor series that comes with a variety of improvements and new features. While the Intel 4 process, a disaggregated architecture and Intel Arc integrated graphics are exciting upgrades, users will appreciate the AI capabilities that Meteor Lake chips come integrated with. Intel announced that it is bringing artificial intelligence to modern computers through an all-new neural processing unit (NPU) in the 14th generation Meteor Lake processors. But what is NPU, and how will it help? Let's talk about it below.

Although artificial intelligence is widely used online, being in the cloud has limitations. The most prominent of them include high latency and connectivity issues. A Neural Processing Unit (or NPU) is a unit dedicated to the CPU for processing AI tasks. So instead of relying on the cloud, all AI-related processing is done on the device itself. Intel's new NPU will be able to do just that.

While Intel has been experimenting with AI for a while, this will be the first time the company will bring an NPU to client-side silicon. The NPU on Meteor Lake chips is a dedicated, low-power AI engine capable of handling sustained AI workloads both offline and online.

This means that instead of relying on AI programs to do the heavy lifting from the internet; you will be able to use Intel NPU to do the same jobs like AI image editing, audio separation and more. Having an NPU on the device for AI processing and inference will undoubtedly have many benefits.