Intel pushes harder to make AI apps run best on Core Ultra

Intel said Tuesday that it is expanding what it calls its AI Acceleration program into midrange software vendors, launching an AI developer NUC to speed the process. It's all a bid to lasso software developers and bring them under the Core Ultra banner. For consumers, the program is an ongoing acknowledgement that Intel continues to work to integrate the NPU inside its Core Ultra processor with software vendors, in order to extract actual value from the logic, and not just capitalize on the latest buzzword, AI. There's a more subtle message, too: if Intel is able to convince software developers to use its OpenVINO toolkit to help them code AI applications, it will help ensure that Intel's Core Ultra chips are the preferred or "better" AI chips. That might not actually be the case, of course. But the push to sign up software developers seems similar to the way in which graphics vendors work with game developers to convince them to add GPU-specific features to their games and thus deliver improved performance.