Join us on November 9 to learn how to successfully innovate and achieve efficiency by upskilling and scaling citizen developers at the Low-Code/No-Code Summit. MLCommons is out today with its latest set of machine learning (ML) MLPerf benchmarks, once again showing how hardware and software for artificial intelligence (AI) are getting faster. MLCommons is a vendor-neutral organization that aims to provide standardized testing and benchmarks to help evaluate the state of ML software and hardware. Under the MLPerf testing name, MLCommons collects different ML benchmarks multiple times throughout the year. In September, the MLPerf Inference results were released, showing gains in how different technologies have improved inference performance.

Global venture capital firms are pouring money into the semiconductor startups developing the next generation of chips. Semiconductors, which have become a valued asset, are used in virtually almost every industry, including 5G networks, automation, the Internet of Things, financials, smart homes, smart cities, virtual reality (VR), augmented reality and self-driving cars. Sunghyun Park, a former quant developer at Morgan Stanley in New York, launched artificial intelligence semiconductor startup Rebellions with four co-founders to enter this red-hot industry in 2020. Today, the South Korea-based company that builds chips designed for artificial intelligence applications, announced it has raised a $50 million (62 billion KRW) Series A from investors, including Temasek's Pavilion Capital, Korean Development Bank, SV Investment, Mirae Asset Capital, Mirae Asset Ventures, IMM Investment, KB Investment and KT Investment. Its existing backers Kakao Ventures, GU Equity Partners and Seoul Techno Holdings also participated in the round, Park told TechCrunch.

AI chip startups are hot on the heels of GPU leader Nvidia. At the same time, there is also significant competition in data center inference... New computing models such as machine learning and quantum are becoming more important for delivering cloud services. The most immediate computing change has been the rapid adoption of ML/AI for consumer and business applications. This new model requires the processing vast amounts of data to developing usable information, and eventually building knowledge models. These models are rapidly growing in complexity – doubling every 3.5 months.

Intel said it is ending work on its Nervana neural network processors in favor of the artificial intelligence chips it gained with the chipmaker's recent $2 billion acquisition of Habana Labs. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company said Friday it has ended development of its Nervana NNP-T training chips and will deliver on current customer commitments for its Nervana NNP-I inference chips, so that it can move forward with Habana Labs' Gaudi and Goya processors in their place. "Habana product line offers the strong, strategic advantage of a unified, highly-programmable architecture for both inference and training," Intel said in a statement provided to CRN. "By moving to a single hardware architecture and software stack for data center AI acceleration, our engineering teams can join forces and focus on delivering more innovation, faster to our customers." Analysts questioned whether Intel would move forward with Nervana after the chipmaker announced its acquisition of Habana Labs in mid-December. The deal was only announced a little over a month after Intel in November revealed more details of its Nervana chips, which were meant to compete with Nvidia's growing footprint of GPUs in the AI acceleration market.

This market is absolutely teeming with chip startups, many of whom are reaching a level of maturity where they are revealing their architectures and starting to produce measurable results. As established semiconductor companies start to appreciate the importance of the AI accelerators, and the range of vertical markets AI will encroach on, will some of them look to jump-start their strategies with acquisitions? With dozens of startups at the stage where first products are being marketed and results are being unveiled, the opposite effect also applies. I spoke with Geoff Tate, CEO of Flex Logix, recently and he quoted Warren Buffett: "When the tide goes out, you can see who's been swimming naked." Not all the startups we see in the market today will be successful.

The past year has been inundated by a wave of consolidation among chipmakers. Throughout 2019, billions of dollars changed hands as industry giants attempted to fill gaps in their product lines and bolster their positions in some of the world's most competitive markets including data center connectivity, artificial intelligence (AI), and 5G networking. Here's a rundown of 2019's five hungriest hippos and the silicon morsels they gobbled up or tossed aside. Intel closed out 2019 by betting big on AI with the purchase of AI startup Habana Labs for $2 billion. The purchase is aimed at cementing Intel's position in the highly competitive data center processor space, which the company predicts will be worth more than $25 billion by 2024.

FILE - In this Oct. 1, 2019, file photo the symbol for Intel appears on a screen at the Nasdaq ... [ ] MarketSite, in New York. Intel said Monday, Dec. 16, that it has bought Israeli artificial intelligence startup Habana Labs for $2 billion. This week Intel agreed to pay roughly $2 billion for Habana Labs. Based in Israel and founded in 2015, the company is a startup focused on AI (Artificial Intelligence) chips. Keep in mind that Habana has raised a total of $75 million, which is a fairly modest amount for a hardware company (Intel Capital was one of the investors). According Intel's executive vice president and general manager of the Data Platforms Group, Navin Shenoy: "This acquisition advances our AI strategy, which is to provide customers with solutions to fit every performance need–from the intelligent edge to the data center.

JERUSALEM: Leading US chip manufacturer Intel Corp. has acquired Israeli artificial intelligence (AI) company Habana Labs for about $2 billion, both companies announced Monday. Habana Labs is an AI processor company founded in 2016 and headquartered in the coastal city of Tel Aviv. After the acquisition, Habana will remain an independent business unit and will continue to be led by its current management team. "The combination strengthens Intel's AI portfolio and accelerates its efforts in the nascent, fast-growing AI silicon market, which Intel expects to exceed $25 billion by 2024," Intel said. "We are excited to partner with Intel to accelerate and scale our business. Together, we will deliver our customers more AI innovation," said David Dahan, chief executive officer of Habana.

In GTC China yesterday, NVIDIA made a series of announcements. Some had to do with local partners and related achievements, such as powering the likes of Alibaba and Baidu. Partners of this magnitude are bound to generate impressive numbers and turn some heads. Another part of the announcements had to do with new hardware. NVIDIA unveiled Orin, a new system-on-a-chip (SoC) designed for autonomous vehicles and robots, as well as a new software-defined platform powered by the SoC, called Nvidia Drive AGX Orin.

US semiconductor giant Intel has acquired Israeli startup Habana Labs, a developer of artificial intelligence processors, for $2 billion, the company announced on Monday. Founded in 2016, Habana Labs develops processor platforms that are optimized for training deep neural networks and for inference deployment in production environments. The company is headquartered in Tel Aviv and has offices in California, Poland, and China. Intel led a $75 million investment in Habana Labs in 2018. That year, Habana unveiled its Goya inference processor which it says is ideally suited for the most demanding AI applications in the industry, including private and cloud data centers, autonomous vehicles, factory and warehouse automation robots, and high-end drones.