Brian Krzanich, chief executive officer of Intel, has presented the industry’s first neural network processor as part of the company strategy on artificial intelligence (AI) business for growth.
Intel will ship Nervana Neural Network Processor (NNP) before the end of this year. “We are thrilled to have Facebook in close collaboration sharing its technical insights as we bring this new generation of AI hardware to market,” said Brian Krzanich at the WSJDLive global technology conference about cognitive and artificial intelligence (AI) technology.
Brian Krzanich said cognitive and artificial intelligence (AI) technology systems are on a trajectory to reach $46 billion in industry revenue by 2020.
Naveen Rao, who leads the AI Products Group as VP/GM, in a blog post said that the Intel Nervana NNP is a purpose built architecture for deep learning. The goal of this new architecture is to provide the flexibility to support all deep learning primitives while making core hardware components as efficient as possible.
“We designed the Intel Nervana NNP to free us from the limitations imposed by existing hardware, which wasn’t explicitly designed for AI,” said Naveen Rao, who was the CEO and co-founder of Nervana, which was acquired by Intel in August 2016.
Intel Nervana NNP will revolutionize AI computing across industries. Enterprises can develop entirely new classes of AI applications that maximize the amount of data processed and enable customers to find insights – transforming their businesses.
Intel’s Nervana Neural Network Processor will support industry verticals such as health care, social media, automotive, etc.
Intel has multiple generations of Intel Nervana NNP products in the pipeline that will deliver higher performance and enable new levels of scalability for AI models. “This puts us on track to exceed the goal we set last year of achieving 100 times greater AI performance by 2020,” Brian Krzanich said.
Last week, Intel announced a 17-qubit superconducting test chip delivered to QuTech, its quantum research partner in the Netherlands. Intel expects to deliver a 49-qubit chip by the end of this year.
Baburajan K
