What's New: At Hot Chips 2019, Intel revealed new details of upcoming high-performance artificial intelligence (AI) accelerators: Intel Nervana neural network processors, with the NNP-T for training and the NNP-I for inference. Intel engineers also presented technical details on hybrid chip packaging technology, Intel Optane DC persistent memory and chiplet technology for optical I/O. "To get to a future state of'AI everywhere,' we'll need to address the crush of data being generated and ensure enterprises are empowered to make efficient use of their data, processing it where it's collected when it makes sense and making smarter use of their upstream resources. Data centers and the cloud need to have access to performant and scalable general purpose computing and specialized acceleration for complex AI applications. In this future vision of AI everywhere, a holistic approach is needed--from hardware to software to applications."

Naveen Rao is vice president and general manager of the Artificial Intelligence Products Group at Intel Corporation. Today at Hot Chips 2019, Intel revealed new details of upcoming high-performance AI accelerators: Intel Nervana neural network processors, with the NNP-T for training and the NNP-I for inference. Intel engineers also presented technical details on hybrid chip packaging technology, Intel Optane DC persistent memory and chiplet technology for optical I/O. To get to a future state of'AI everywhere,' we'll need to address the crush of data being generated and ensure enterprises are empowered to make efficient use of their data, processing it where it's collected when it makes sense and making smarter use of their upstream resources," said Naveen Rao, Intel vice president and GM, Artificial Intelligence Products Group. "Data centers and the cloud need to have access to performant and scalable general purpose computing and specialized acceleration for complex AI applications.

Intel's chief datacenter exec Navin Shenoy kicked off the company's Data-Centric Innovation Summit Wednesday, the day-long program devoted to Intel's datacenter strategy, encompassing a number of product and technology updates, including another 14nm Xeon kicker, called Cooper Lake. The headline-stealing announcement was Intel's chip business hitting $1 billion in artificial intelligence revenue in 2017. The bulk of that comes from inferencing workloads, Intel indicated, noting that FGPAs and IoT are not included in the total figure. The company sees that AI opportunity growing to $10 billion by 2022. "There's going to be a portion [of that total addressable market] that's strictly training and a portion that's strictly inference," said Intel's head of AI products Naveen Rao.

Normally, this is the time of year when Intel would hold its Intel Developer Forum conference, which would be replete with new product announcements. But with the demise of the show last year, the company instead held an all-day event that it live-streamed over the web. The company's Data Centric Innovation Summit was the backdrop for a series of processor and memory announcements aimed at the data center and artificial intelligence, in particular. Even though Intel is without a leader, it still has considerable momentum. Navin Shenoy, executive vice president and general manager of the Data Center Group, did the heavy lifting.