Intel Shows Off Its AI Chips And Chops

Intel held its inaugural Artificial Intelligence (AI) Developers Conference in San Francisco on May 23-24th, presenting its leadership, technologies, and customers to a capacity audience of some 800 AI geeks and media. The company now has a rich portfolio of AI technologies, after acquiring Movidius and MobileEye for real-time processing, Altera for reprogrammable FPGA acceleration hardware, and Nervana for the training workloads currently served by NVIDIA GPUs. Intel's primary focus on inference processing for the production use of trained neural networks is a sound strategy, as inference is likely to become a much larger market that the training segment over the next few years. While Intel does not yet have a brawny ASIC in its portfolio to build AI networks, it can create a sizable position in inference, alongside companies such as Apple, Qualcomm, Xilinx, and NVIDIA. That being said, Intel has not abandoned the AI training market, where NVIDIA is enjoying tremendous success with a $3B run rate.