This joint Intel-Acronis solution delivers enterprise-grade security with consumer-level simplicity—empowering MSPs, MSSPs, and enterprise customers to stay ahead of cyber threats without sacrificing performance. By combining Intel’s AI PC platform and Acronis’ integrated cyber protection, businesses can reduce risk, improve operational efficiency, and deliver resilient endpoint security at scale.
By leveraging the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) ability to analyze complex behavioral patterns and detect malicious behavior with high accuracy, Acronis enhances its real-time threat detection capabilities, identifying sophisticated malware and zero-day attacks that traditional methods might miss. Offloading this computationally intensive task to the Intel Neural Processing Unit (NPU) optimizes performance, reducing the strain on the device's CPU and ensuring efficient power consumption, which is particularly valuable for users on laptops or resource-constrained systems. For Acronis users, this translates to stronger protection, minimal system slowdowns, and a seamless experience, all while maintaining cutting-edge security against evolving cyber threats.
Acronis uses OpenVINO™ AI frameworks to offload behavioral detection models to the NPUs in Intel Core Ultra processors. The NPUs manage inferencing and analysis tasks, such as behavioral heuristics and anomaly scoring. Tasks incompatible with the NPU, such as orchestration logic, remain on the CPU.
This is not an integration activated in the platform, but is an embedded technology that will shortly be available by default when the Security + EDR offering is enabled.
Intel Ultra Processors and XPU workload management with Neural Processing Unit (NPU) as key to AI workloads. A Neural Processing Unit (NPU), also referred to as an AI accelerator or deep learning processor, is a class of specialized hardware accelerator or computer system designed to accelerate artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning applications, including artificial neural networks and computer vision.
Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud leverages NPU to offload AI models to analyze complex behavioral patterns and detect malicious behavior—including sophisticated malware, ransomware, zero-day attacks, and file-less attacks that antimalware might miss—all behind the scenes. The resource-intensive AI inferencing required can slow a CPU to a crawl, but the NPU in an Intel Core Ultra processor handles it easily, optimizing performance and reducing power consumption.
As behavioral detection shifts from the CPU to the NPU, OpenVINO calibrates and validates AI models, ensuring that the same threat-detection inferencing logic is used. In performance tests conducted by Acronis, moving inferencing from the CPU to the NPU reduced the load on the CPU by up to 92%, optimizing performance and reducing power consumption.
