You probably know that Apple, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Samsung and just about anybody else who makes processors is stuffing their products with circuitry to accelerate AI tasks. What you might not know is that AI is also being used to accelerate the design of those very processors.
Case in point: Intel. The Santa Clara, California-based company plans to detail its new Meteor Lake processors on Thursday, products it hopes will transform laptops into what it calls “AI PCs.” But Intel also used AI to create those processors.
AI tools catch bugs early in the design process so chips come to market faster, and they oversee manufacturing so more of the tiny slices of silicon that Intel makes end up inside products instead of in the trash can. For Meteor Lake, Intel’s first major processor made of multiple “chiplets” stacked into one package, the AI tools help find the best way to sell each processor given a multitude of slight differences in each processor’s components.
With these AI tools, “the amount of sellable units is increasing significantly,” Shlomit Weiss, a co-leader of Intel’s Design Engineering Group, said in an exclusive interview.
See also: Inside Intel’s Chip Factory, I Saw the Future. It’s Plain Old Glass
That’s key for Intel, a company scrambling to reclaim chipmaking leadership lost to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) and rebuild the US industrial base. And if you’re one of the millions of people who uses a Windows PC, it’s important for you too, since better manufacturing means laptops that perform better and cost less.
Processors these days consist of tens of billions of tiny electronic on-off switches called transistors. Information in the form of ones and zeros cascades through them to spell-check your resume, calculate your income tax and sharpen that picture on your phone. Figuring out how to optimally arrange all those transistors and to check that they’ll perform as needed is beyond any human, so computers have long been essential to the processor manufacturing business.
But using AI is a new wrinkle. Artificial intelligence systems, trained to recognize patterns in complex real-world data, can perform tasks like screening out spam and identifying your face in your phone’s camera roll. Now they’re helping humans to get a better handle on processor production.
