Intel announced a range of new products, technologies and investments from the edge to the data center to help expand and accelerate the growth of artificial intelligence (AI). The company developing new chips to drive AI capabilities in everything from smart factories and drones to sports, fraud detection and autonomous cars.
Intel had acquired AI startup Nervana in August this year and now the company is giving more details about where it will include Nervana’s tech into the product roadmap. Intel will test first silicon (code-named “Lake Crest”) in the first half of 2017 and will make it available to key customers later in the year. In addition, Intel announced a new product (code-named “Knights Crest”) on the roadmap that tightly integrates Intel Xeon processors with the technology from Nervana. Lake Crest is optimized specifically for neural networks to deliver the highest performance for deep learning and offers unprecedented compute density with a high-bandwidth interconnect.
Diane Bryant, executive vice president and general manager of the Data Center Group at Intel said that before the end of the decade, Intel will deliver a 100-fold increase in performance that will turbocharge the pace of innovation in the emerging deep learning space. Bryant also announced that Intel expects the next generation of Intel Xeon Phi processors (code-named “Knights Mill”) will deliver up to 4x better performance than the previous generation for deep learning and will be available in 2017. In addition, Intel announced it is shipping a preliminary version of the next generation of Intel Xeon processors (code-named “Skylake”) to select cloud service providers.
Intel also sells FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays), which are circuits that can reprogrammed to do specific tasks. Intel wants to put FPGAs in servers, autonomous cars, robots, and drones. Intel next year will ship the Deep Learning Inference Accelerator, an FPGA that competes with inferencing chips like Google’s Tensor Processing Unit. Intel also announced Intel Nervana AI Academy which will track three groups viz, Academia, Professionals, and Startups. The Academy will host meetups, offer onsite, online and event based training, plus an ongoing expansion of enablement activities.