10nm Ice Lake CPU Meets M.2: The 'Spring Hill' Nervana NNP-I Deep Dive

Intel revealed the broad outlines of its new Nervana Neural Network Processor for Inference, of NNP-I for short, that comes as a modified 10nm Ice Lake processor that will ride on a PCB that slots into an M.2 port (yes, an M.2 port that is normally used for storage), at an event in Haifa, Israel two months ago. Today, the company provided further deep-dive details of the design here at Hot Chips 31, the premier venue for leading semiconductor vendors to detail their latest microarchitectures. Intel is working on several different initiatives to increase its presence in the booming AI market with its'AI everywhere' strategy. The company's broad approach includes GPUs, FPGAs, and custom ASICs to all tackle different challenges in the AI space, with some solutions designed for compute-intensive training tasks that create complex neural networks for object recognition, speech translation, and voice synthesis workloads, to name a few, and separate solutions for running the resulting trained models as lightweight code in a process called inference. Intel's Spring Hill Nervana Neural Network Processor for inference (NNP-I) 1000, which we'll refer to as the NNP-I, tackles those lightweight inference workloads in the data center.