At a recent industry event, Intel welcomed the next wave of artificial intelligence (AI) with updates on new products designed to accelerate AI system development and deployment from cloud to edge.
Intel demonstrated its Intel Nervana Neural Network Processors (NNP) for training (NNP-T1000) and inference (NNP-I1000) — Intel’s first purpose-built ASICs for complex deep learning with incredible scale and efficiency for cloud and data center customers. Intel also revealed its next-generation Intel Movidius Myriad Vision Processing Unit (VPU) for edge media, computer vision and inference applications.
Now in production and being delivered to customers, the new Intel Nervana NNPs are part of a systems-level AI approach offering a full software stack developed with open components and deep learning framework integration for maximum use.
The Intel Nervana NNP-T strikes the right balance between compute, communication and memory, allowing near-linear, energy-efficient scaling from small clusters up to the largest pod supercomputers. The Intel Nervana NNP-I is power- and budget-efficient and ideal for running intense, multi-modal inference at real-world scale using flexible form factors. Both products were developed for the AI processing needs of leading-edge AI customers like Baidu and Facebook.
Additionally, Intel’s next-generation Intel Movidius VPU, scheduled to be available in the first half of 2020, incorporates unique, highly efficient architectural advances that are expected to deliver leading performance. Intel also announced its new Intel DevCloud for the Edge, which along with the Intel Distribution of OpenVINO toolkit, addresses a key pain point for developers.
Naveen Rao, Corporate VP and GM, Artificial Intelligence Products Group, Intel
Purpose-built hardware like Intel Nervana NNPs and Movidius Myriad VPUs are necessary to continue the incredible progress in AI. Using more advanced forms of system-level AI will help us move from the conversion of data into information toward the transformation of information into knowledge.
