Building on the AI PC use cases shared at Innovation 2023, Intel today launched the AI PC Acceleration Program, a global innovation initiative designed to accelerate the pace of AI development across the PC industry.

The program aims to connect independent hardware vendors (IHVs) and independent software vendors (ISVs) with Intel resources that include AI toolchains, co-engineering, hardware, design resources, technical expertise and co-marketing opportunities. These resources will help the ecosystem take full advantage of Intel Core Ultra processor technologies and corresponding hardware to maximize AI and machine learning (ML) application performance, accelerate new use cases and connect the wider PC industry to the solutions emerging in the AI PC ecosystem. More information is available on the AI PC Acceleration Program website.

The Age of the AI PC

Arrival of the AI PC represents an inflection point in the PC industry – an age marked by increasing availability of software enhanced by AI and ML algorithms. These applications empower people to create art, make music, synthesize knowledge and work smarter. Intel is at the forefront of this transition with robust architectures for the central processing unit (CPU), graphics processing unit (GPU) and neural processing unit (NPU) to optimize the performance and power efficiency of AI software.

“Intel recognizes that software leadership is key to the AI PC experience, and we’re uniquely positioned to lead the industry with an open ecosystem approach. With a long history in AI development and a deep network of ISV engineering relationships, Intel will take an active role in fostering connections and innovations that propel new use cases and experiences on the PC,” said Michelle Johnston Holthaus, executive vice president and general manager of the Client Computing Group at Intel.

Enhancing PC Experiences

The AI PC Acceleration program will provide access to Intel’s deep bench of engineering talent for targeted software optimizations and tuning based on ISV needs, core development tools and software developer kits like OpenVINO™, and go-to-market opportunities.

Working with more than 100 ISVs on more than 300 AI-accelerated features – including Adobe, Audacity, BlackMagic, BufferZone, CyberLink, DeepRender, Fortemedia, MAGIX, Rewind AI, Skylum, Topaz, VideoCom, Webex, Wondershare Filmora, XSplit and Zoom – Intel will help enhance PC experiences across audio effects, content creation, gaming, security, streaming, video collaboration and more.

Inaugural partners of the AI PC Acceleration Program share:

• "We at Audacity are thrilled to be partnering with Intel to help bring powerful, open and, most importantly, free AI tools to a mass audience of AI PC users. With time, we expect these kinds of initiatives to produce a new kind of creative environment for musicians, podcasters and audiophiles – a worthy successor to the traditional audio tools that have typified the last 20 years. We hope that this will be the first of many successful AI initiatives with Audacity. We have long hoped that Audacity can become a general hub for researchers to showcase their work, while also providing curious users with a rich and varied suite of amazing new AI tools to try out.” –Martin Keary, head of product at Audacity  
• "We are excited to optimize DaVinci Resolve for the latest Intel Core Ultra processor with advanced media engine and AI technologies. With our strong partnership and Intel’s unwavering support for the creator community, we are looking forward to being able to fully optimize our software for the latest Intel Core Ultra processor and enhance the user experience for our customers.” –Rohit Gupta, director of DaVinci software engineering at Blackmagic Design  
• “The ability to run deep learning directly on Intel PCs with an onboard NPU is a game-changer for our safe-browsing solution. It will help reduce cost and privacy concerns of Cloud AI while helping customers better protect against account phishing scams that have become the No. 1 entry point for all attacks.” –Dr. Ran Dubin, CTO at Bufferzone  
• "At Webex, we are continually looking to enhance the collaboration experience for our users and AI is critical to this. We are excited to work with Intel to enable new media AI functionality using Intel® OpenVINO™ toolkit and new Neural Processing Unit (NPU) integrated on Intel’s processors to improve power efficiency and platform response during Webex meetings.” –Chris Rowen, vice president, Engineering, Collaboration AI at Cisco  
• “CyberLink believes that neural processing units, like Intel’s NPU, will be key to delivering a whole new AI experience to users. We are closely partnering with Intel on NPU enablement and look forward to the benefits gained from integrated AI inference acceleration.” –Dr. Jau Huang, chairman and CEO of CyberLink  
• “Intel Core Ultra enables Deep Render to provide 5x superior AI-only video compression for AI PC users, delivering unparalleled video quality equivalent to 5x faster home internet. Thanks to the remarkable NPU performance, Deep Render achieves lightning-fast, energy-efficient AI video compression on end-user devices.” –Chri Besenbruch, co-founder and CEO of Deep Render  
• “Here at Fortemedia, we are at the forefront of audio processing and have a long standing relationship with Intel that enables us to take advantage of platform capabilities to deliver the best possible experience to our customers. With the NPU, Intel is raising the bar in power efficient AI processing and we look forward to taking advantage to the fullest extent possible.” –William Lau, director, Sales, Business Development and Ecosystems at Fortemedia  
• “We at MAGIX see a huge demand for mobile devices that are powerful enough for video editing but still have full-day battery life. Modern notebooks have come a long way with Intel’s hybrid architecture processors. In addition, our apps heavily use the GPU for demanding media processing workloads. MAGIX appreciates the integration of an NPU in the upcoming Intel Core Ultra processor as the next logical step toward an even more energy-efficient heterogeneous compute environment. In addition to running optimized AI workloads on the CPU and GPU, as we are doing currently, we are excited to explore the NPU capabilities and are actively looking for ways to make our video editing workflows more energy-efficient, together with the Intel engineering team. We believe that AI PC will be an essential tool for creators over the next two years.” –Hagen Hirchce, CTO of MAGIX  
• “Rewind’s vision is to give humans superpowers. We do that by offering a personalized AI powered by everything you’ve seen, said or heard. We are excited to bring Rewind to Windows PCs through Intel’s market leadership and deep technical collaboration where we can leverage the rich AI capabilities of the new Intel Core Ultra processor. We’re pleased to join the AI PC Acceleration Program, as we share Intel’s view that AI Acceleration is integral to the PC experience.” –Dan Siroker, co-founder and CEO of Rewind  
• “At Skylum, we are experts in AI-assisted photo editing, with our most prominent product being the award-winning software Luminar Neo. It’s well known that tasks in this area constantly demand more resources: Photo resolution is increasing, and more and more tools are oriented toward ML processing. Intel’s initiatives in the AI space, both on the CPU and GPU side, as well as the company’s decision to add NPUs to all of its new processors, allow us to improve the user experience for our creators significantly. This positively impacts the speed of task execution inside Luminar Neo, while also reducing the overall load on user devices.” –Dmytro Mykhalchuk, vice president of Product and Engineering at Skylum  
• “Topaz Labs empowers creative professionals to produce stunning visuals through innovative, AI-powered photo and video enhancement tools. With Intel’s new Core Ultra line of processors, we’re able to leverage the NPU for superior machine learning performance while running our complex deep learning models. Our partnership with Intel will help us to continue to develop cutting-edge photo and video enhancement software and bring the AI PC to everyone.” –Dr. Suraj Raghuraman, head of AI Engine at Topaz Labs  
• “We are very excited about Intel’s new Meteor Lake platform. The improved CPU and GPU capabilities allow us to improve the quality and responsiveness of our applications, and at the same time completely offload AI workloads to the built-in NPU. We have worked with Intel on integration of the NPU for our video processing and aim to work on a number of other AI features that we can now run offline on the NPU. It’s a massive step forward and we are excited to bring new capabilities to our customers.” –Gareth Reynolds, head of product at VideoCom.com Inc.  
• “Filmora is excited to empower our 100M+ users with the amazing AI features powered by the new Intel processors. By harnessing the full AI capabilities of the Intel Core Ultra processor across the CPU, GPU and the innovative NPU, we assist users in enhancing, streamlining and unleashing their creative potential, allowing them to craft captivating videos effortlessly. We look forward to continuing our strong partnership with Intel, making AI-powered PCs accessible to all creators.” –Shearer Wang, product marketing director at Wondershare Filmora  
• “We are incredibly eager to reap the fruits of our ongoing work with Intel to integrate Intel NPU functions into VCam, as having the ability to offload background segmentation and other AI workloads to the NPU is critical to achieve a higher video quality on business hardware. By utilizing a larger AI model running on the Intel NPU, we are able to reduce background removal inaccuracies on live video by up to 30%, while at the same time significantly reducing the overall load on the CPU and GPU. We share Intel’s vision for the AI PC with powerful new hardware for creators and we just can’t wait for this technology to become mainstream through efforts like the AI PC Acceleration Program.” –Andreas Hoye, CEO at XSplit  
• “The use of AI techniques in video conferencing scenarios has grown significantly over the last few years and we at Zoom are very happy to see that Intel is integrating their NPU to provide a power-efficient AI accelerator to offload imaging and audio AI workloads. Intel’s adoption of the NPU across their roadmap means that the Zoom experience will benefit from improved power efficiency for AI workloads starting with Meteor Lake platforms soon with even more to come in the future.” –Eric C. Yu, head of Hardware Partnerships at Zoom

The AI PC Acceleration program is an extension of Intel Partner Alliance’s AI Accelerator Initiative, which provides a programmatic engagement approach for more than 1,000 ISV partners to build, optimize and deploy AI solutions from the edge through the cloud.