Intel To Launch Spring Crest, Its First Neural Network Processor, In 2019

At its first AI Developer Conference, Intel announced the Nervana NNP-L1000, which is the first neural network processor (NNP) to come out of the Nervana acquisition. The chip will prioritize memory bandwidth and compute utilization over theoretical peak performance. Initially, Intel started competing with Nvidia in the machine learning (ML) chip market with its Xeon Phi architecture, which used tens of Atom cores to "accelerate" ML tasks. However, Intel must have realized that Phi alone wasn't going to allow it to catch up to Nvidia, which seems to make significant leaps in performance every year. As such, the company began looking for other options, which led it to buy Altera for its field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), Movidius for its embedded vision processor, MobilEye for its self-driving chip, and Nervana for its specialized neural network processor.