The company told technology developers Wednesday that it plans next year to deliver a new version of the Xeon Phi processor – a product line previously targeted at scientific applications – with added features created to accelerate tasks associated with what Silicon Valley calls artificial intelligence.
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The chip, which belongs to the family of high-performance Xeon Phi processors, gives Intel a legitimate opportunity to tackle machine learning. Nvidia says its latest chips remain much faster than Intel’s technology. According to a blog post from Nvidia, Intel’s results seem impressive only because it benchmarked its new Xeon Phi processors against years-old GPUs and software.
The chips will have many cores and will make approximations using learning models and algorithms, Waxman said. Its Knights Hill sister, a third-generation 10nm Phi announced in 2014, will be used in supercomputers, such as the US Department of Energy’s forthcoming 180PFLOPS Aurora beast. Google has developed a custom processor for its machine learning applications on its own, saying nothing was available on the market that met its performance and price requirements. Knights Mill will be a primary chip, meaning it will be able to boot up computers. Having Baidu-part of the group of major hyperscale players that Intel has dubbed the “Super 7” and which also includes such vendors as Google, Facebook, Amazon and Alibaba-come out in support of the effort also was important, he said.
The Nervana acquisition brings talent, intellectual property and also most importantly, software, which will be optimized to work with Knights Mill, Waxman said.
Intel is advancing its A.I. roadmap at a frantic pace, and Knights Mill is a leap forward, Waxman said.
However, Nvidia strongly disputes these claims, explaining that majority were cherry-picked to improve Intel’s standing.
Intel has a different set of concerns than Google does when designing its processors for machine learning.
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Chinese web firm Baidu said that it plans to use the upcoming Xeon Phi chips in data centres being built for the company’s “deep speech” platform.
