Key points
- Intel shares a new robot chip target in Seoul
- Intel compares its robot chip target with Nvidia's
- Why Intel's 2028 date tracks Korean robot makers
Intel (INTC) plans to release a robotics chip called Razor Lake-AX in 2028, with humanoid robots as a main target. The company is aiming for about 700 TOPS of AI performance. Intel executive Cho Min-sung gave the plan on Oct. 16 at a conference on humanoid robot chips at COEX in Seoul, according to The Elec (디일렉).
TOPS stands for trillions of operations per second. It describes a chip's theoretical computing throughput, not how fast a robot will do a particular task.
"Our current robotics development tools based on Panther Lake offer 180 TOPS in theory," Cho said. "We plan to offer about 700 TOPS of performance, with the next-generation Nova Lake early next year and Razor Lake-AX in 2028."
The report treats 700 TOPS as the Razor Lake-AX target and gives no separate figure for Nova Lake. It also doesn't say which numerical precision the figure uses, or how much of it would come from the chip's processor, graphics, and AI cores. Intel markets its Panther Lake chips with up to 180 platform TOPS, so the 2028 target is about 3.9 times that figure by our arithmetic. Without the measurement basis for the new target, that isn't a direct performance comparison.
Nvidia's newer robot computer uses a different measure
The report compared the target with Nvidia (NVDA)'s Jetson AGX Orin, which Nvidia rates at up to 275 TOPS. Intel's stated target is about 2.5 times Orin's headline figure, but the unspecified measurement basis prevents a direct performance comparison.
Orin isn't Nvidia's newest robot computer, though. Nvidia made Jetson Thor generally available in August 2025 and rates it at up to 2,070 FP4 teraflops, which Nvidia says is 7.5 times the AI performance of AGX Orin. FP4 is a low-precision number format, so Thor's figure isn't measured the same way as Orin's TOPS either.
The 2028 target lines up with Korean customers' plans
Humanoid robots run AI on the robot itself, so they can process sensor data and respond quickly without relying on a remote server. That makes the chip inside the robot a big part of how well it works.
Cho described the production plans of Intel's customers in Korea. "Our customers in Korea are planning to mass-produce autonomous mobile robots next year, and most of them are aiming for 2028 for humanoids," he said. The report ties the 2028 Razor Lake-AX launch to that schedule. That matches an earlier forecast from Hanwha Investment Securities (한화투자증권) analyst Kim Sung-rae that most humanoid companies are aiming for full production in 2028.
For now, Intel offers robot makers its Core Ultra Series 3 processors, which combine a CPU, a GPU, and an NPU in one chip. Intel also offers a hardware and software development platform called Robinson Bay, plus software tools including OpenVINO, Physical AI Studio, and Robotics AI Suite. The company is also selling AI chips for data centers, including the D-Series inference card Intel detailed on Oct. 12.
The report describes Razor Lake-AX only as a chip for robots and doesn't mention laptops or desktop PCs.
Cho's remarks are translated from Korean.
