Intel, GraphCore And Groq: Let The AI Cambrian Explosion Begin

As we approach the end of a year full of promises from AI startups, a few companies are meeting their promised 2019 launch dates. These include Intel, with its long-awaited Nervana platform, UK startup Graphcore and the stealthy Groq from Silicon Valley. Some of these announcements fall a bit short on details, but all claim to represent breakthroughs in performance and efficiency for training and/or inference processing. Other recent announcements include Cerebras's massive wafer-scale AI engine inside its multi-million dollar CS-1 system and NVIDIA's support for GPUs on ARM-based servers. I'll opine on those soon, but here I will focus on Intel, Graphcore and Groq's highly anticipated chips.