US-based semiconductor entity Intel on May 2 announced that there are now over 500 artificial intelligence (AI) models running optimised on its Core Ultra processors. These models, Intel said, are available from popular industry sources, including OpenVINO Model Zoo, Hugging Face, ONNX Model Zoo and PyTorch.

According to Intel, the optimised AI models draw from categories of local AI inferencing, including large language, diffusion, super-resolution, object detection, image classification/segmentation, computer vision, and others.

“Intel has a rich history of working with the ecosystem to bring AI applications to client devices, and today we celebrate another strong chapter in the heritage of client AI by surpassing 500 pre-trained AI models running optimized on Intel Core Ultra processors,” said Robert Hallock, Intel vice president and general manager of AI and technical marketing in the Client Computing Group. “This unmatched selection reflects our commitment to building not only the PC industry’s most robust toolchain for AI developers, but a rock-solid foundation AI software users can implicitly trust.”

Detailing how AI models work, Intel said these models are one of many critical layers in the software stack that determine the performance, stability and capabilities of an AI-driven application. OpenVINO, for example, optimises the Intel Core Ultra by load-balancing across all the compute units, compressing the models to run efficiently in an AI PC, and optimising the runtime to take advantage of memory bandwidth and core architecture within Intel Core Ultra.

With over 500 AI models now running optimised on Intel Core Ultra processors, developers have the opportunity to create new AI PC features by utilising these models and building on them. The more AI models there are, the more AI PC features are enabled – said Intel.