Picked by Techconnect's Editors On Thursday, Intel debuted “Clover Falls,” an AI companion chip that the company will ship as a platform-level enhancement for commercial PCs, and presumably later for consumer PCs as well. Intel described Clover Falls, aka the Intel Visual Sensing Controller, as a “secure companion chip that helps make PCs more smart and secure through the power of Intel artificial intelligence.” It will be mounted on the laptop’s motherboard, “bringing new low-power capabilities to the PC and helping it sense and adapt to its surroundings,” according to a blog post published by the company. So what exactly will Clover Falls do? As with many things relating to AI, it’s not exactly clear. One example that Intel gave claimed that the Clover Falls module could help the system automatically adjust display brightness after detecting user presence. It’s likely that Clover Falls will be a sort of AI co-processor, tasked with the kind of low-power, semi-passive monitoring that normally the CPU wakes up to do periodically. By offloading some of these functions to a dedicated chip, the main PC processor can remain in a deep sleep, preserving battery life.