Intel Axes Nervana AI Chips In Favor Of Habana Labs

Intel said it is ending work on its Nervana neural network processors in favor of the artificial intelligence chips it gained with the chipmaker's recent $2 billion acquisition of Habana Labs. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company said Friday it has ended development of its Nervana NNP-T training chips and will deliver on current customer commitments for its Nervana NNP-I inference chips, so that it can move forward with Habana Labs' Gaudi and Goya processors in their place. "Habana product line offers the strong, strategic advantage of a unified, highly-programmable architecture for both inference and training," Intel said in a statement provided to CRN. "By moving to a single hardware architecture and software stack for data center AI acceleration, our engineering teams can join forces and focus on delivering more innovation, faster to our customers." Analysts questioned whether Intel would move forward with Nervana after the chipmaker announced its acquisition of Habana Labs in mid-December. The deal was only announced a little over a month after Intel in November revealed more details of its Nervana chips, which were meant to compete with Nvidia's growing footprint of GPUs in the AI acceleration market.