The Intel Corporation (Nasdaq: INTC) board of directors meeting in mid-September is fast approaching, and plans that the executive will present for solving the company’s liquidity problems continue to leak to the press and media. Last week, Bloomberg reported that Intel was examining the possibility of splitting into two separate companies, one dealing with chip development, and the other with production. According to a report from Reuters two days ago, however, that plan is not currently expected to be presented, and CEO Pat Gelsinger and his team are now working on other measures that will ease the cash flow problems and enable the company to proceed with building factories and developing advanced production processes that will put it on a par with the world’s largest chip manufacturers. At the same time, Intel has launched a new processor with AI engine.
Yesterday, Intel unveiled its new processors for personal computers, codenamed Lunar Lake and marketed as Core Ultra 200V, which are available for pre-ordering and will be fully launched on September 24. This is Intel’s most advanced processor for Windows-based personal computers. It was designed under Israeli leadership, and is being produced outside of Intel, by the company’s competitor TSMC of Taiwan. Purchasers of all personal computers made by Lenovo, Samsung, Acer, Asus, LG, and MSI that are bought with the new processor will be entitled to a free update of Copilot+, Microsoft’s AI applications package, from November.
The design, architecture and development of the Lunar Lake processor, and also of the next generation CPU, Panther Lake, are managed from Haifa by an Israeli team headed by Zohar Tsaba, vice president of the Client Development Group at Intel. Development manager of Panther Lake is Barak Hasson and group and design manager of the Client Development Group is Yaron Alankry. "Three years ago, we identified the huge potential of artificial intelligence in personal computers," Tsaba said in the company announcement. "We decided to invest in development of a strong AI engine, even though at that time it was not clear how it would be used. Today we can see that it was a correct gamble.
"The Lunar Lake project is led from Israel from beginning to end. The Israeli team is responsible for all the critical stages: product definition, concept development, architecture planning, design, and execution. The project as a whole involves many hundreds of engineers and professionals," Tsaba added.
The launch of Lunar Lake, which was announced at the Computex exhibition in Taiwan last June, comes right at the start of the academic year and in time for the year-end holidays. The fourth quarter has traditionally been the strongest for Intel, as people equip themselves with personal computers at bargain prices. Intel has to prove that it still leads the core processors for personal computers market, as more companies set their sights on it, among them AMD, which has been taking market share from Intel, and Qualcomm, which up to now has dominated the smart telephone processor market and is currently trying its luck in the computers market as well. So far, the competing processors have met with tepid reviews. Technology website The Verge, for example, found that an Asus computer with an AMD processor was not a worthy competitor to Apple’s Mac computers, and Qualcomm’s processors have been criticized for less than perfect video game capabilities.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on September 4, 2024.
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