Baidu Releases AI Benchmark EE Times

DeepBench is available online along with first results from Intel and Nvidia processors running it. The benchmark tests low-level operations such as matrix multiplication, convolutions, handing recurrent layers and the time it takes for data to be shared with all processors in a cluster. Machine learning has emerged as a critical workload for Web giants such as Baidu, Google, Facebook and others. The workloads come in many flavors serving applications such as speech, object and video recognition and automatic language translation. Today the job of training machine learning models "is limited by compute, if we had faster processors we'd run bigger models…in practice we train on a reasonable subset of data that can finish in a matter of months," said Greg Diamos, a senior researcher at Baidu's Silicon Valley AI Lab.