Intel Corp.’s (NASDAQ: INTC) board meeting in mid-September is fast approaching, and the CEO’s plans to solve the company’s liquidity problems continue to leak to the press and media. Last week, Bloomberg reported that Intel was considering splitting into two separate companies, one dealing with chip development and the other with production. However, according to a Reuters report two days ago, such a plan is not currently expected to be presented, and CEO Pat Gelsinger and his team are now working on other measures that would ease cash flow problems and enable the company to move forward with building factories and developing advanced production processes that would put it on par with the world’s largest chipmakers. Intel, meanwhile, has launched a new processor with an artificial intelligence engine.
Intel yesterday unveiled its new processors for PCs, codenamed Lunar Lake and marketed as the Core Ultra 200V, which are now available for pre-order and will be fully released on September 24. This is Intel’s most advanced processor for Windows PCs. Designed under Israeli leadership, it is produced outside of Intel by its rival TSMC in Taiwan. Buyers of all PCs made by Lenovo, Samsung, Acer, Asus, LG, and MSI that are purchased with the new processor will be eligible for a free update to Copilot+, Microsoft’s AI suite, starting in November.
An Israeli team led by Zohar Tsaba, Intel’s vice president of client development, is leading the design, engineering and development of the Lunar Lake processor, as well as the next generation of Panther Lake CPUs, out of Haifa. Panther Lake’s development director is Barak Hasson and the group and design director of the client development group is Yaron Alankiri. “Three years ago, we identified the enormous potential of AI in personal computers,” Tsaba said in the company’s announcement. “We decided to invest in developing a powerful AI engine, even though at the time it was not clear how it would be used. Today we can see that it was the right gamble.”
“The Moon Lake project is being implemented from Israel from start to finish,” Tsaba added. “The Israeli team is responsible for all critical stages: product definition, concept development, architectural planning, design, and implementation. Hundreds of engineers and professionals are involved in the project as a whole.”
The launch of Lunar Lake, announced at Computex in Taiwan in June, comes at the start of the school year and in time for the end-of-year holidays. Intel’s fourth quarter has traditionally been its strongest, as people outfit themselves with cheap PCs. Intel must prove it still leads the core PC processor market as more companies set their sights on it, including AMD, which has been eating away at Intel, and Qualcomm, which has dominated the smartphone processor market and is now trying to push its luck in the PC market as well. So far, the rival processors have met with tepid reviews. For example, The Verge, a technology news site, found that an Asus computer with an AMD processor was not a worthy competitor to Apple’s Mac computers, and Qualcomm processors have been criticized for their incomplete video game capabilities.
This article was published in Globes, Israeli Business News – en.globes.co.il – on September 4, 2024.
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