AI might be a relatively recent phenomenon for consumers, but for the higher education community, AI research, workloads, and applications have been critical for years. Students and faculty have embraced AI primarily for research in fields ranging from astronomy to economics to analytics and more. Traditionally, AI-powered workloads have been run on high-end workstations or servers.
Today, AI use has experienced rapid growth with new applications that can run directly on PCs. Research still plays a strong role, but these PC-based applications can also include tools to reduce the administrative burden, simplify lesson-plan development for educators, and assist student learning by correcting grammar, checking code, or transcribing lectures.
For faculty, staff, and students to employ AI effectively and responsibly, they need hardware and software technologies that maximize performance, minimize costs, and provide enhanced security features to help keep sensitive information and data secure. This is where Intel can help.
Intel Core Ultra processors bring AI power to the PC
Intel offers multiple reliable platforms designed to run AI workloads and applications from a large ecosystem of partners. Now, Intel is integrating AI processing and acceleration directly into the chipsets with Intel Core Ultra processors. With laptops built on Intel Core Ultra processors, students and educators can more efficiently run AI-based workloads that support their research, teaching, learning, and administrative needs.
Intel Core Ultra processors are unique because they provide a central processing unit (CPU), graphics processing unit (GPU), and neural processing unit (NPU), all of which work in concert to accelerate AI workloads while reducing latency and power consumption.
Laptops configured with Intel Core Ultra processors offer faculty, students, and researchers a richer, more responsive experience for the apps they use daily. To extend these benefits as broadly as possible, Intel works closely with a vast, growing ecosystem of more than 100 software vendors to run more AI-based applications directly on the PC. When run locally, apps can make full use of Intel Core Ultra processors to accelerate their innovative AI-based features.
For example, the popular video collaboration app Zoom relies on AI for noise suppression, image optimization, virtual background generation, and translation services. Zoom also uses AI Companion to generate email, chat messages, meeting summaries, brainstorming ideas, and more. With built-in NPUs on Intel AI PCs, Zoom AI functions can be offloaded from the CPU for improved efficiency and performance.
The benefits of Intel AI PCs extend to other collaboration and productivity apps like Google Meet and Microsoft Copilot. Creativity software like the Adobe Creative Cloud apps and Google Photos also benefit from Intel Core Ultra processors by providing a rich user experience for photo and video editing.
Intel processor–powered AI PCs can also help students do research and development across a wide range of fields and use cases, including advanced 3D modeling and simulations, robotics, software development, game development, advanced analytics, information modeling, media editing, data visualization, virtual reality (VR) training, and much more.
In addition, student programmers can use devices built with Intel Core Ultra processors to optimize and deploy deep learning (DL) models on the Intel® Distribution of OpenVINO™ toolkit. The OpenVINO toolkit boosts performance for generative AI workloads and offers models to simplify code generation, creating chatbots, computer vision, speech recognition, and more.
Bringing strong security to AI computing
Faculty, staff, and researchers working in higher education require more than high performance and efficiency from their AI PCs. Strong, built-in security and support are also critical for helping to keep data secure and devices operating smoothly. PCs built on Intel Core Ultra processors can play an important role in both of these aspects by:
- Supporting the apps that students and faculty rely on. After all, many of the most popular software applications used in higher education, for business, or by consumers were written for Windows running on Intel architecture.
- Helping keep personal information, research data, and proprietary school information private and secure with strong built-in security capabilities.
- Enabling long battery life, high power efficiency, fast response times, and high throughput for graphics and AI processing.
Educational institutions can extend security and manageability even further with devices running Intel Core Ultra processors on the Intel vPro® platform. Intel vPro offers enhanced security at multiple levels to provide hardware-isolated data and memory protection, along with advanced management features such as remote troubleshooting of unresponsive PCs.
The era of AI PCs is here
AI is revolutionizing how we teach and learn. Today, in the era of AI PCs, students, faculty, and staff can use engaging new applications in a computing environment that brings strong security and manageability to higher education.
Intel is bringing responsible AI to higher education by focusing on ethical, equitable, and inclusive practices in AI development, deployment, and governance. In fact, Intel has been a trusted partner in higher education for years, boasting a long track record of supporting students, faculty, IT, and researchers. For example, the Intel higher education software development website provides courses, APIs, and toolkits that teachers can use to help their students build and optimize AI code. In addition, Intel offers multiple frameworks and tools that developers can access to simplify and accelerate the development of AI and machine learning (ML) workflows.
To learn more about how Intel is helping transform education with AI PCs powered by Intel Core Ultra processors, visit “Exploring the Potential of AI in Education” and “Technologies to Enable Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Higher Education.”
Notices and Disclaimers
AI features may require software purchase, subscription or enablement by a software or platform provider, or may have specific configuration or compatibility requirements.
Performance varies by use, configuration, and other factors. Learn more at www.intel.com/PerformanceIndex.
Michael A. Campbell is a Global Transformational Leader with 20+ years of focused experience in product marketing, strategy, business development, and sales, influencing multi-million-dollar revenue increases and organizational growth. Currently, Campbell is the General Manager of the Education Division within Intel’s Client Computing Group.
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