Intel brings artificial intelligence to new business unit

Intel has established a new business unit that brings together all developments related to artificial intelligence. The Artificial Intelligence Products Group is led by Naveen Rao, who was CEO of Nervana Systems, which was acquired by Intel.

The goal of the new business unit is to bring together all artificial intelligence developments within Intel. Intel also says it is setting up a new research lab that focuses entirely on artificial intelligence. There, the chip giant will experiment with new architectures and algorithms that can be used for artificial intelligence.

Naveen Rao heads the new Artificial Intelligence Products Group. He was the CEO of Nervana Systems, a start-up specializing in deep learning and artificial intelligence. The company was acquired by Intel in August last year. A few months after that acquisition, Intel announced a strategy to improve the performance of artificial intelligence applications.

Intel wants to come up with its own accelerators for this, which have to compete with GPUs. In the first half of this year, Intel’s first Nervana product, which is being developed under the name Lake Crest, is due to be released. This product is still largely based on the developments of Nervana Systems itself and is therefore still produced at 28nm at TSMC. The switch to a smaller process will probably be made at Intel at a later date.

Intel is also working on Knights Crest, a combination of a Xeon processor and a Nervana accelerator. By 2020, the Nervana platform should have reduced the time it takes to train deep learning models by a factor of 100 compared to GPUs, Intel promises.