Richard Waters in San Francisco
Intel has staked out another part of the new computing
landscape that is taking shape around artificial intelligence, following the acquisition of
Nervana, an ambitious AI start-up that will extend its reach into software as
well as chips.
The purchase, for an
undisclosed amount, adds to the range of technologies Intel has been developing to deal with the computing
tasks required by AI. These include the machine learning techniques used to
train AI systems, as well as processing the large amounts of data such systems
work with.
The deal comes a week before
Intel’s annual developer event, where it is expected to outline its plans for
developing new systems that will power future generations of intelligent
systems.
The set of technologies being
developed around machine learning and AI were shaping up to become a
significant new computing platform in their own right, said Patrick Moorhead, a
US chip analyst. It is needed to support a growing range of applications, from self-driving cars and robotics to text-to-speech systems and image
identification, he added.
Nervana was founded less than
three years ago to design a complete system to handle deep learning, an approach to AI that
emulates the working of neural networks in the brain.
It is tackling a number of
technologies from software algorithms to a specialised chip, known as an
application-specific integrated circuit.
That “full-stack” approach,
intended to produce a workable system that customers with large volumes of data
to process will be able to tap into, is a new departure for Intel.
“We thought about the platform
from top to bottom,” said Naveen Rao, Nervana’s chief executive. It was
designed to produce a general-purpose system for “any company that gathers
data”, with early customers including Ford, Airbnb and Monsanto, he added.
Intel failed to catch the
mobile computing wave, losing out to a generation of chips based on designs
from the UK’s Arm Holdings. However, it succeeded in
extending its dominance of PC processors into the server market, making today’s
cloud datacentres a stronghold for the company. The Nervana purchase marks an
attempt to extend its datacentre dominance into new computing workloads that
rely on AI.
Intel rival Nvidia has taken an early lead in neural networks with
its graphics processing units, or GPUs. Originally designed to generate images
in computing games, these have proved well-suited to handling deep learning.
Adding Nervana’s technology,
alongside its in-house development of Xeon processors, would reduce the need
for Intel to move into GPUs itself to keep up with this new market, said Mr
Moorhead.
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