At the opening of the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, Paul S. Otellini unveiled Intel's next-generation, power-optimized micro-architecture for future digital home, enterprise, mobile and emerging market platforms -- and low-power products that will enable a new category of converged consumer devices. Intel will introduce a micro-architecture in the second half of 2006, that combines the company's current Intel NetBurst and Pentium M micro-architectures and adds new features. "We will deliver factor of 10 breakthroughs to a variety of platforms that can reduce energy consumption tenfold or bring 10 times the performance of today's products. At the same time, Intel innovation will continue to deliver unique digital enterprise, home, office and mobile features, such as greater manageability, security and virtualization, along with an increasing capability to manage and view digital content," Otellini said. Intel currently has more than 10 processor projects that contain four (quad-core) or more processor cores per chip. Otellini also announced that forthcoming lower-power products will lead to a new category of ultra energy-efficient Handtop PC devices that provide a converged communication and PC-like experience but require less than a watt of processing power and weigh under a pound.
The prevailing narrative around artificial intelligence (AI) has been one of relentless scale. Bigger models, bigger clusters, bigger budgets. The assumption, largely unchallenged until recently, was that raw parameter count translated directly into competitive advantage. New research from Omdia suggests it's time to retire that assumption. According to the latest market study by Omdia, parameter growth in frontier AI models has slowed to around 5 percent annually since 2021, a stark contrast to the more than hundredfold expansion seen between 2019 and 2021. Enterprise AI Market Development For executives who have been making infrastructure and investment decisions based on the assumption that AI would keep demanding ever-larger, ever-more-expensive hardware, this finding deserves serious attention. The race to the top of the model size leaderboard has, at least for now, plateaued. Crucially, Omdia's analysts are not reading this as an AI winter. Alexander Harrowell, senior pri...