Intel's hardware for accelerating AI computation is finally on its way to customers. The company announced today that its first-generation Neural Network Processor, code named "Lake Crest," will be rolling out to a small set of partners in the near future to help them drastically accelerate how much machine learning work they can do. The NNPs are designed to very quickly tackle the math that underpins artificial intelligence applications, specifically neural networks, a currently popular branch of machine learning. One of the big problems with the large, deep neural networks that are popular right now is that they can be very computationally intensive, which makes them harder to test and deploy rapidly. At first, the NNPs will only get released to a small number of intel partners who the company plans to begin outfitting before the end of this year.