Intel Wants To Help Smaller ISVs Make Killer Apps For AI PCs

By empowering smaller developers, Intel is seeking to deliver on its promise that AI PCs will deliver game-changing capabilities and justify the massive investments the chipmaker and other companies in the PC market have made to develop the foundational technologies.

Intel wants to give smaller independent software developers a boost in making killer apps for the hordes of AI PCs coming to the market this year and beyond.

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company announced Tuesday that it has expanded its AI PC Acceleration Program to provide development resources to small- and medium-sized ISVs building AI PC applications on top of the large ISVs it started working with when the program launched last fall.

“We want to make it easy and simple for the small ISV, the medium-sized ISV, the individual, the university student to get access to Core Ultra developer kits and get the tools get up and running and start driving innovation because we're seeing innovation happening [everywhere],” said Todd Lewellen, vice president and general manager of client ecosystem development at Intel, in a briefing.

The semiconductor giant said the program’s purview has also been extended to support independent hardware vendors. These are companies who build various components for PCs that aren’t processors, such as SSDs, displays, sensors, cameras and touch interface controllers.

With the program’s expansion, Intel is seeking to deliver on its promise that AI PCs will deliver game-changing capabilities and justify the massive investments the chipmaker and other companies in the PC market have made to develop the foundational technologies.

According to Intel, Microsoft’s requirements for an AI PC is that it includes the operating system vendor’s Copilot AI assistant, a key for Copilot and a processor with a CPU, GPU and neural processing unit (NPU), the latter of which is a low-power engine designed to offload certain AI workloads from the CPU and GPU to improve a computer’s efficiency.

This makes Intel’s Core Ultra processors one of the few options PC vendors currently have to build AI PCs. The only other options for Windows-based AI PCs are AMD’s Ryzen 7040 and 8040 processors until Qualcomm releases its Snapdragon X chips later this year.

Major PC vendors like HP Inc., Lenovo and Dell Technologies have revealed AI PCs that meet Microsoft’s requirements in the past few months, and these include new generations of existing product lines, like HP’s EliteBooks, Lenovo’s ThinkPads and Dell’s XPS laptops.

In the briefing, Lewellen (pictured above) claimed that Intel’s Core Ultra series has the first integrated NPU delivered “at scale for the PC market” and reiterated the chipmaker’s plan to enable 100 million AI PCs by 2025.

“This kind of volume makes it incredibly compelling for our ISVs and [independent hardware vendors] to invest in delivering new AI PC innovation based on Core Ultra,” he said.

When the AI PC Acceleration Program launched last October, Intel said it was providing co-engineering and design resources, AI toolchains and technical expertise, among other things, to more than 100 ISVs working on over 300 AI-accelerated features for PCs. These ISVs included big names like Adobe, Zoom Video Communications and Cisco Systems.

Now the company is looking to go beyond those initial ISV engagements by providing smaller developers with access to tools, workflows, frameworks, AI models that have been optimized to run on Intel processors and development kits that use Core Ultra chips. Supported frameworks include Intel’s OpenVINO as well as ONNX, DirectML and WebNN, with more on the way.

Intel has also launched an online knowledge center that serves as an “easy and organized one-stop shop for documentation, documentation, training, tech blogs, etc.,” according to Carla Rodriguez, vice president and general manager of client software ecosystem at Intel.

The chipmaker’s work with independent hardware vendors, on the other hand, involves giving them access to Intel’s Open Labs, “where they can receive technical and co-engineering support early in the development phase of their hardware solutions and platforms,” according to Intel. These hardware vendors will also receive reference hardware on which to test new capabilities for AI PCs.

“Intel has already onboarded 150 hardware vendors around the world into our AI PC Accelerator Program,” said Matt King, senior director of client hardware ecosystem at Intel.