Next year will see the release of Intel’s 14th generation “Meteor Lake” Core processors. However, the business has disclosed that the future chips would include a brand-new processor known as a “VPU.”
In the notes for a new driver Intel developers introduced to the free and open-source Linux kernel last week, which was discovered by Phoronix (Opens in a new window), the VPU is mentioned. Versatile Processing Unit (VPU) is a CPU-integrated inference accelerator for computer vision and deep learning applications, according to Jacek Lawrynowicz, an Intel firmware engineer (Opens in a new window).
Versatile Processing Unit (VPU) on Intel Processors:
This indicates that the VPU is made for AI-powered applications, such as those that process multimedia and edit images. According to Lawrynowicz, the VPU is made up of a number of parts, including a “neural compute subsystem” that handles the labor-intensive tasks and a “buttress” that connects to the CPU of the Intel chip.
The processing unit is also called “Intel VPU for Meteor Lake and newer” in the company’s Linux driver, which shows that it will be a feature of all future Intel devices.
The most recent Intel CPUs already have improvements like “Deep Learning Boost” and “Gaussian & Neural Accelerator” that are meant to speed up workloads for some AI-powered content creation apps.
So, the future VPU processing unit may be a step up from the technology Intel has now. (The company also showed off a vision processing unit in 2017, but it was only for low-powered chips that would be used in IoT devices like cameras.)
