IBM's now serving chips for AI

INSTANCES of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), or deep learning are appearing across all sorts of enterprise service offerings. While there's a certain amount of bandwagon-jumping and overuse of the terms to grab headlines, machine-learning (et al) implementations are becoming quite the norm. Combined with a rise in the numbers of massive public networks of computing power (hyperscale data centers) offering everything-as-a-service (XaaS) from the cloud, it's no surprise that the big enterprise-level server vendors are responding with AI-centric technologies. The first into the fray is IBM, which has announced a new microprocessing chip and a server powered by it, the Power9 and the AC922 respectively. The chip is optimized for the particular demands of AI computation: in tests, it runs workloads on common AI frameworks such as Chainer and TensorFlow at four times the speed of existing systems.