These “chips” let you game on your PC, navigate a car or improve your daily life with artificial intelligence algorithms.
They’re the most complex devices manufactured. And it takes the world’s most advanced manufacturing technologies and the expertise of thousands of engineers, technicians and architects to create them.
A new animated video, “How Intel Makes Chips: Concept to Customer,” offers a simple overview of the manufacturing process – from design engineering through mask operations and assembly and testing – to create these tiny but fiendishly complex devices.
What’s New: Today at a gathering of industry influencers, 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.
“With this next phase of AI, we’re reaching a breaking point in terms of computational hardware and memory. 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.”
–Naveen Rao, Intel corporate vice president and general manager of the Intel Artificial Intelligence Products Group
What’s New: Today at the Linley Fall Processor Conference in Santa Clara, Calif., Intel revealed the first architectural details related to Tremont. Intel’s newest and most advanced low-power x86 CPU architecture, Tremont offers a significant performance boost over prior generations.
“Tremont is Intel’s most advanced low-power x86 architecture to date. We focused on a range of modern, complex workloads, while considering networking, client, browser and battery so that we could raise performance efficiently across the board. It is a world-class CPU architecture designed for enhanced processing power in compact, low-power packages.”
–Stephen Robinson, Intel Tremont Chief Architect
Why It Matters: Tremont next-generation low-power x86 microarchitecture delivers significant IPC (instructions per cycle) gains gen-over-gen compared with Intel’s prior low-power x86 architectures. Designed for enhanced processing power in compact, low-power packages, Tremont-based processors will enable a new generation of innovative form factors for client devices, creative applications for the internet of things (IoT), efficient data center products and more. Read the rest of Intel Introduces Tremont Microarchitecture
Recent Findings Should be Celebrated, but Practical Realities are the Real Test
By Rich Uhlig
Quantum computing receives a lot of attention due to its potential to take on problems beyond the reach of today’s computers, such as new drug discovery, financial modeling and exploring how the universe works.
Universities, governments and technology companies around the world are striving to achieve a commercially-viable quantum computing system. While the collective progress is real – and is getting noticed – the field is still at mile one of what will be a marathon toward quantum computing’s commercialization.
That said, important milestones along this journey should be recognized, celebrated and built upon.
More Promising Results
As researchers at Intel and across the globe are discovering, quantum computing has the potential to tackle problems that conventional computing – even the world’s most powerful supercomputers – can’t quite handle.
Today, it was confirmed that researchers from Google had demonstrated the extraordinary speed of quantum, as compared to traditional supercomputers, with a benchmark test known as “quantum supremacy.” The Google team designed an algorithm that could run an analysis in 200 seconds on a small quantum processor, a 53-qubit superconducting test chip, that would take the most powerful supercomputer approximately 10,000 years to perform.
In a recent blog, I discussed Intel’s work with Thorn, an organization that leverages technology to fight child sex trafficking. Intel and Thorn use machine learning to match online images of children in sexually explicit content with images of known missing children. With the power of artificial intelligence (AI), we hope to accelerate victim identification, disrupt the platforms that host this content and deter predators. This is an excellent example of how technology can be an important weapon in the fight to protect children.
Intel’s work with Thorn combines artificial intelligence and machine vision to help solve business and societal challenges. Human visual perception is an important part of many tasks, especially when success depends on subtle variables that are beyond the reach of simple “if-then” algorithms. On the other hand, humans have limited capacity to evaluate and compare many detailed visual tasks at once. The breakthrough comes when we can marry human-quality visual perception with the computational capacity of AI. This powerful combination of technologies has applications across automatic inspection and process control in manufacturing, agriculture, healthcare, and many other industries.
Unless IT and lines of business are on the same page, new enterprise technology initiatives are doomed to fail. You can prevent it.
Key Takeaways
Understanding the challenges faced by lines of business within an organization will enable AI to transition from a novelty to a critical analytics function
Marketing departments can derive significant value from the potential of AI to analyze massive data sets
CFOs will be interested in AI’s ability to automate processes, manage risk, and detect fraud
Consider what challenges AI might help marketing overcome. And how might these differ from the challenges faced by finance? With these two lines of business earmarked as areas of strong opportunity for AI, considering these questions is critical to understanding how IT
The CMO: Building deeper connections with customers
Adoption of AI-based technologies within marketing is fairly mature relative to the enterprise a whole, and most marketing leaders anticipate AI will be the technology area that experiences the most growth over the next two years.1
According to Salesforce, 51 percent of marketing leaders already use AI, with more than a quarter planning a pilot in the next two years.1
51% of marketing leaders already use AI, and more than a quarter are planning a pilot within the next two years.2
What's New: Today, Intel announced that an 8 million-neuron neuromorphic system comprising 64 Loihi research chips — codenamed Pohoiki Beach — is now available to the broader research community. With Pohoiki Beach, researchers can experiment with Intel's brain-inspired research chip, Loihi, which applies the principles found in biological brains to computer architectures. Loihi enables users to process information up to 1,000 times faster and 10,000 times more efficiently than CPUs for specialized applications like sparse coding, graph search and constraint-satisfaction problems.
“We are impressed with the early results demonstrated as we scale Loihi to create more powerful neuromorphic systems. Pohoiki Beach will now be available to more than 60 ecosystem partners, who will use this specialized system to solve complex, compute-intensive problems.”
–Rich Uhlig, managing director of Intel Labs
Why It's Important: With the introduction of Pohoiki Beach, researchers can now efficiently scale up novel neural-inspired algorithms — such as sparse coding, simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), and path planning — that can learn and adapt based on data inputs. Pohoiki Beach represents a major milestone in Intel's neuromorphic research, laying the foundation for Intel Labs to scale the architecture to 100 million neurons later this year.
An Emerging Leader in Ethernet Switch Silicon for the Data Center, Barefoot Networks will Help Intel’s Data Center Group Meet the Rapidly-Changing Needs of Hyperscale Cloud Customers
By Navin Shenoy
Intel's customers operate in a world that is growing and transforming by leaps and bounds. We've discussed previously the amazing fact that over half of the world's data was generated in the past two years and only 2% of that data has been analyzed. Driven by that reality, we're always asking ourselves how we can better enable our customers to harness the potential of this data, by moving, storing and processing it with the speed and efficiency that they demand.
An essential part of the equation is providing data center interconnects that can keep pace with our customers' extraordinary and growing requirements. This is why interconnect is one of our six technology pillars in which we are investing to serve our customers.
With this in mind, Intel has signed an agreement to acquire Barefoot Networks, an emerging leader in Ethernet switch silicon and software for use in the data center, specializing in the programmability and flexibility necessary to meet the performance and ever-changing needs of the hyperscale cloud. Upon close, the addition of Barefoot Networks will support our focus on end-to-end cloud networking and infrastructure leadership, and will allow Intel to continue to deliver on new workloads, experiences and capabilities for our data center customers.
Sanjay Gangal interviewed Ben Levine, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Rambus at headquarters.
Sanjay: Tell us about your presentation at the IP-SoC Conference.
Ben: My focus area is on security, in particular hardware security cores, the idea being that you want security embedded in really any chip to provide security to the rest of the chip in the system. So my talk today was talking about that, particularly for connected devices. The fact that everything is connected to the internet these days means that every device is now exposed to a wide range of threats and attackers. So you need really strong security. So I just talked about some of the challenges, particularly around not only devices being connected, but devices being complex, what the impact is on security, and how you can solve some of those problems with our hardware security core.
Sanjay Gangal interviewed John Mitchell, President and CEO of APEX/IPC 2019.
SG: How is IPC show been going?
JM:: IPC Apex Expo has been going great, we're very excited. Those exhibitors here have been having a great show, doing a lot of great business, selling product. The standards committee meetings have been going on since Saturday, will go for all the way through Saturday and then we have many different education programs going on in our professional development segment as well, and the attendance has been off the charts. It's been great. Read the rest of Interview with John Mitchell, President and CEO of APEX/IPC 2019.
By Navin Shenoy
