Intel executives pledged Tuesday that its upcoming Panther Lake chip will combine the best aspects of its earlier processors, Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake. Intel executives spoke in Las Vegas on the second day of its Intel Vision conference, which engages Intel's partners and customers. Intel's new chief executive Lip-Bu Tan outlined his plans for Intel's new direction on Monday, asking for brutal honesty while pledging to return Intel to greatness. We already knew that Panther Lake would be a critical product for Intel this year. Not only is the chip the next iteration of Intel's PC client roadmap, but it's the first chip on Intel's next-generation 18A manufacturing process.

Intel's new Arrow Lake architecture, aka the Core Ultra 200S series, brings AI capabilities onto Intel desktops. But the chip doesn't use the Copilot capabilities of Intel's mobile Lunar Lake chip -- its designers used the older NPU found on Meteor Lake instead. For now, this means that if you buy an Arrow Lake chip, you won't be able to use it with some of the new AI enhancements found within Windows 11's 2024 Update, like generative AI and the controversial Recall function. Arrow Lake's optimized NPU 3 only provides 13 TOPS, while Microsoft set 40 TOPS as the bar for Copilot status. Intel still plans to ship more than 40 million AI PCs in 2024, using the vaguer "AI PC" definition that accompanied the launch of Meteor Lake.

At Land O'Lakes, a member-owned cooperative agribusiness, farmers are using data and artificial intelligence to make smarter decisions. Over the past 30 years, corn farmers have used advances in bioengineering, chemicals, and analytics to boost their average yields by 50%, from 120 to 180 bushels per acre. Those advances pale in contrast to future corn yields that will be made possible using data and AI: Demonstrations promise to triple that average -- to 540 bushels per acre -- by the end of this decade. Farmers don't have to wait that long to see some of those benefits, however. Through extensive experimentation and complex algorithms, Land O'Lakes is already providing AI-driven recommendations to help individual farmers become more productive.

Intel executives confirmed Tuesday that the company will make a concerted push to bring AI capabilities to PCs with its next next-generation CPU cores, code-named Meteor Lake. Both Intel chief executive Pat Gelsinger and an Intel fellow, Rajshree Chabukswar, confirmed that there will be AI capabilities arriving with Meteor Lake, which will probably be named the 14th-gen Core chip. Intel formally revealed the desktop enthusiast version of its 13th-gen Core chip (Raptor Lake) this week at its Intel Innovation conference in San Jose. AI has proven to be a powerful business opportunity within the enterprise, with seemingly the majority of enterprise chip announcements emphasizing their inferencing ability. AI hardware can help train algorithms to assist with visual recognition, predictive capabilities, and more.

Intel executives disclosed that 2024's Lunar Lake chip will be optimized for ultraportables for 15 watts and below, while reiterating that 2023's Meteor Lake chip is still on track. And if you haven't guessed it already, the future of Intel's processors continues to be "disaggregated" designs that will include various application-specific tiles all working in concert. All this is scheduled to be talked about at this week's Hot Chips conference, an academic conference where, typically, existing products are dissected by their designers. Intel chief executive Pat Gelsinger will deliver a keynote titled "Semiconductors Run the World," which will talk about how semiconductors are becoming more specialized through the integration of various functions. A number of big-name chip companies, including AMD, Arm, Mediatek, Nvidia, and Samsung will join Tesla and smaller startups to talk about their own advances.

In addition to the many HPC workloads and other scientific computing tasks where Intel's AVX-512 performance on their latest processor proves very beneficial, it also turns out AVX-512 can provide significant benefit to a much more mundane web server task: JSON parsing. The simdjson project that is focused on "parsing gigabytes of JSON per second" this week issued simdjson 2.0 and is headlined by an Intel-led contribution of AVX-512 support. The JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) data interchange format is heavily used by practically all major websites/web-applications in some capacity and can be dealt with by pretty much all programming languages. JSON really need not any introduction. The past few years there has been simdjson as an open-source (Apache 2.0 licensed) project aimed at delivering the highest performance JSON parser that can parse "gigabytes of JSON per second" and claims of being 4 25x faster than alternatives.

"Land O'Lakes is one of the most important food suppliers in the U.S., and our nation's farmers and consumers rely on its ability to rapidly adapt to changing market forces through innovation," said Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft. "Through our partnership, we will apply the power of Azure and its AI capabilities to help Land O'Lakes solve some of the most pressing challenges facing the industry and bridge the divide between rural and urban communities." "As America's farmers continue to deliver the world's safest, most affordable food supply, they face an increasing number of obstacles that are beyond their control. The data-based, precision agriculture tools that we are building with Microsoft will provide the edge they need, but unreliable or nonexistent high-speed internet in rural areas keeps these tools out of reach for many. Through this alliance, we will work to address this need and help farmers remain profitable and sustainable," said Beth Ford, president and CEO of Land O'Lakes, Inc.

An autonomou truck from startup Plus.ai took three days to drive 2,800 miles, from Tulare, CA, to Quakertown, PA, to deliver 40,000 pounds of butter for Land O'Lakes. Startup Plus.ai has completed what is being called the first commercial freight cross-country trip by an autonomous truck, a 2,800-mile-run from Tulare, CA, to Quakertown, PA, that took three days to deliver 40,000 pounds of butter for Land O'Lakes. A human safety driver was aboard the autonomous 18-wheeler to take over if needed, accompanied by a safety engineer. The company said the trip was a smooth one with zero "disengagements," which occur when a self-driving system has to be suspended because of a problem. Ten to 15 companies in the U.S. are working on autonomous freight delivery, said Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities, who believes the trucking industry will be the first to adopt autonomous technology on a mass scale.

In widening its punishment of China in the ongoing US-China trade war, the US has extended its blacklist to directly handicap its biggest competition in a much higher stakes race, for world domination in AI. Recently, almost ten more AI companies – including providers of video surveillance, facial and speech recognition and data recovery; were added to US trade black list. The reasons cited were related to the violation of human rights by the supposed usage of AI technology in China's repression the Muslim ethnic minority groups of the Uygur region. Here is an interesting digression; that one of the most notable Chinese AI companies in this most recent US blacklist is SenseTime Group (known for its facial recognition AI tech), whose founder Tang Xiao'ou was appointed as the foreign national to Malaysia's sovereign wealth fund, Khazanah Nasional. SenseTime is the top AI'unicorns' startup from China with a valuation of over USD7 billion.