Intel Emphasizes Scale-Out in Competition for AI CPU Market Share

Intel's strategy for tackling the AI CPU market, where it is facing competition from leading GPU makers and potentially also big customers that make their own specialized processors for this purpose, such as Google, rests to a great extent on designing systems that scale out rather than up. The latter, according to the chipmaker, is the conventional but inefficient approach to architecting these systems. Software code in today's machine learning systems (machine learning is one of the most active subfields in the development of artificial intelligence) is tough to scale and usually lives in a single box, Charles Wuischpard, VP of the Intel Data Center Group and general manager of the giant's HPC Platform Group, said. Companies generally buy high-power scale-up systems filled with GPUs. "In a way, there's an efficiency loss here," he said on a call with reporters last week.