Intel Pledges First Commercial Nervana Product 'Spring Crest' in 2019

At its AI developer conference in San Francisco yesterday, Intel embraced a holistic approach to AI and showed off a broad AI portfolio that includes Xeon processors, Movidius technologies, FPGAs and Intel's Nervana Neural Network Processors (NNPs), based on the technology it acquired in 2016. In his opening keynote, Naveen Rao, general manager of Intel's artificial intelligence products group and former CEO of Nervana Systems, revealed that the first commercial Nervana product will debut in late 2019 and will be called NNP L-1000 (codename: Spring Crest). Intel anticipates that Spring Crest will offer 3-4x the training performance of its development product Lake Crest. Originally scheduled for availability last year, Lake Crest is being used as a software development vehicle to gather feedback from early partners. This is reminiscent of how Intel handled its first Phi product, Knights Ferry, a development prototype that was never widely available.