Can ARM chips compete neck-and-neck with Intel and AMD on benchmarks? That could be happening sooner than you think. Starting next year, ARM processors will get significantly faster thanks to big changes in the company's Cortex-A chip designs. ARM is taking a page from rivals like AMD that have focused on raising the performance threshold in chips. ARM isn't known for superfast chips; it is instead mainly associated with power-efficient chips that give long battery life to devices.

Connie Brenton, senior director of legal operations at NetApp and chairman of the board of the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC), said AI technology takes "significant resources to get up and running." Speaking at Legalweek: The Experience 2017 Conference, she joined other experts in explaining the financial reality of AI. "We're talking years before AI fundamentally changes the way we practice law," Brenton said. Jennifer McCarron, technology program manager at Cisco, said lawyers have to account for the costs behind licensing and purchasing the solutions. With Riverview Law's KIM virtual assistant, for example, she estimated the "starting point" for 10 users is about $30,000 to automate and create in-house workflows and processes. She said tailor-made programs with "templates for auto-generated documents" also increase the cost.

Intel has moved to a new architecture called Kaby Lake for its PC chips, but it isn't done with the previous generation Skylake yet. The company will release new Xeon server chips based on Skylake in mid-2017, and they will boast big performance increases, said Barry Davis, general manager for the accelerated workload group at Intel. The Skylake Xeon chips will go into mainstream servers and could spark a big round of hardware upgrades, Davis said. Xeon chips aren't as visible as Intel's PC chips but remain extremely popular. Companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon buy thousands of servers loaded with Xeon chips to power their search, social networking, and artificial intelligence tasks.