IBM's machine learning server adds TensorFlow

When Intel unveiled its BigDL machine learning framework, it emphasized CPU rather than GPU power. With this move, Intel hopes to keep its present and future hardware competitive in the expanding world of machine learning. IBM also is interested in boosting the use of its CPUs for machine learning in PowerAI, though with a different strategy. It pairs IBM's Power8 processors with Nvidia GPUs, and IBM says it's a prime method for running common machine learning applications like Caffe, Torch, and Theano. Now IBM has added TensorFlow to the mix. Google's deep-leaning framework spans both CPUs and GPUs, and IBM is pushing PowerAI as the perfect hardware blend to make the most of TensorFlow.