Microsoft partners with Intel to bring optimized deep learning frameworks to Azure - Enterprise & Hybrid Cloud Services

Generally, default builds of popular deep learning frameworks like TensorFlow are not fully optimized for training and inference on CPU. To solve this issue, Intel has open-sourced framework optimizations for Intel Xeon processors. Microsoft recently announced a partnership with Intel to bring optimized deep learning frameworks to Azure. These optimizations are available on the Azure marketplace in the name of Intel Optimized Data Science VM for Linux (Ubuntu). These optimizations leverage the Intel Advanced Vector Extensions 512 (Intel AVX-512) and Intel Math Kernel Library for Deep Neural Networks (Intel MKL-DNN) to accelerate training and inference on Intel Xeon Processors.