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Intel Aims To Take on Nvidia With a Processor Specially Designed for AI (fastcompany.com)

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the fight-intensifies dept.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In what looks like a repeat of its loss to Qualcomm on smartphones, Intel has lagged graphics chip (GPU) maker Nvidia in the artificial intelligence revolution. Today Intel announced that its first AI chip, the Nervana Neural Network Processor, will roll out of factories by year's end. Originally called Lake Crest, the chip gets its name from Nervana, a company Intel purchased in August 2016, taking on the CEO, Naveen Rao, as Intel's AI guru. Nervana is designed from the ground up for machine learning, Rao tells me. You can't play Call of Duty with it. Rao claims that ditching the GPU heritage made room for optimizations like super-fast data interconnections allowing a bunch of Nervanas to act together like one giant chip. They also do away with the caches that hold data the processor might need to work on next. "In neural networks... you know ahead of time where the data's coming from, what operation you're going to apply to that data, and where the output is going to," says Rao.

6 of 43 comments (clear)

  1. So basically Intel is SkyNet.. by werld · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The thing about AI is this.. I play video games and boy the AI sure does suck. It has always sucked and every year I think its going to get better but never does.. If we can't program AI well in video games, then i'll say were a lot further off than the projections ive been seeing.. But what the hell do I know?

    1. Re:So basically Intel is SkyNet.. by Quince+alPillan · · Score: 4, Insightful

      AI in video games is very different from the AI that these chips would be using. The AI in video games sucks for three reasons:

      1. If the AI were too good, players would quit because it is too hard. Certain games specifically are designed to be extremely hard, but this isn't the norm. In a first person shooter, this would be the equivalent of fighting against an aimbot. (Aimbots are a great example of AI - they're designed to be perfect or to use information that the player doesn't normally have.) It becomes a game balance and design decision to make the AI imperfect.

      2. Complex AI can be very computationally intensive. There's a tradeoff in the speed of calculations between "good enough" and "perfect" in some algorithms. When you're dealing with a lot of variables in a complex game that a good AI might use, it takes a lot of processor cycles to calculate how to respond to you to make it more difficult for you. Take for example Civilization that takes far longer between turns at the end of the scenario than it does at the beginning of the scenario because there are more variables to consider.

      3. Given 1 and 2, the easiest method to implement a balanced AI is to cheat - give the computer advantages that the players don't have or to hardcode certain behaviors. Those behaviors can be easy for humans to learn and beat, even when the computer is cheating.

      The processors in this article are talking about new chips that are designed to calculate the math for a certain type of complex calculation by making assumptions about the type of calculation being done and taking some shortcuts with the drawback that they can't perform other calculations as fast.

  2. Sounds lika a Hail Mary for Intel by ClickOnThis · · Score: 2

    For Intel's sake, this had better rock, or else it's DOA.

    I'm guessing you'd need to purchase a specialized motherboard with accompanying chipset to use one of these. Whereas GPUs can just plug into slots that most motherboards have already.

    GPUs, like cassette tapes, may be with us for awhile before something else comes along that competes well enough with them in cost and utility to make switching a no-brainer.

    --
    If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
    1. Re:Sounds lika a Hail Mary for Intel by dj245 · · Score: 2

      For Intel's sake, this had better rock, or else it's DOA.

      I'm guessing you'd need to purchase a specialized motherboard with accompanying chipset to use one of these. Whereas GPUs can just plug into slots that most motherboards have already.

      GPUs, like cassette tapes, may be with us for awhile before something else comes along that competes well enough with them in cost and utility to make switching a no-brainer.

      Slots come and go. Just in my (young) lifetime I have seen 4 different slot standards for graphics cards (ISA,PCI,AGP, and PCI-E) just for the consumer market. Plus a bunch of other ones of varying popularity for the server market. If something better comes along and doesn't get mired in a patent fight, the slot will change again.

      --
      Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
  3. Not even Intels first.. by thesupraman · · Score: 2

    AI chip that is, rather than n00b ;)

    http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1993-02-13/business/1993044090_1_neural-networks-chips-michael-glier
    NI-1000, back in 1993, for missles (or more to the point to cash in of defense spending of course)

    https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/embedded/products/quark/mcu/se-soc/overview.html
    A little more recently we have Quark-SE, with 'pattern matching hardware'

    https://www.hpcwire.com/2017/08/28/intel-debuts-myriad-x-vision-processing-unit-neural-net-inferencing/
    And of course rather more recent, the Myriad range - I thought those were your new NN chips Intel?

    The pattern is of course Intel buys up one-idea-wonders, warms them over the a while, then releases them as 'the big thing!', but since there is little actual product development, market cooperation, or even perhaps one would think any actual business plan, they flash-and-fail.

    Intel is great at manufacturing x86 chips, and pretty good at holding a captured market, but non-x86 innovation? not such a good track record.

  4. Here we go again by AlanObject · · Score: 2

    For Intel's sake, this had better rock, or else it's DOA.

    Odds are it is already DOA. Intel being Intel they get the itch every now and then and feel the need to capture some high-yield revenue stream other than the x86 family.

    Over the years they have done it all. FPGAs? Embedded controllers? RISC processors? Switch Chips? Infiniband? GPUs? The list is endless. From this perspective "neural net" is nothing new.

    Start with some tech acquisition, run up a bunch of hype, do some trade shows or even TED talks. At the end of the day it doesn't run Windows so it doesn't make money for them and the business unit is quietly sold off or disbanded.

    Check in on this in 12 months and you will find Intel strategic talk on "getting back to core competency" again.