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Intel Lays Roadmap For 100-Fold AI Performance Boost With Nervana and Knights (hothardware.com) 44

MojoKid writes: Intel is laying out its roadmap to advance artificial intelligence performance across the board. Nervana Systems, a company that Intel acquired just a few months ago, will play a pivotal role in the company's efforts to make waves in an industry dominated by GPU-based solutions. Intel's Nervana chips incorporate technology (which involves a fully-optimized software and hardware stack) that is specially tasked with reducing the amount of time required to train deep-learning models. Nervana hardware will initially be available as an add-in card that plugs into a PCIe slot, which is the quickest way for Intel to get this technology to customers. The first Nervana silicon, codenamed Lake Crest, will make its way to select Intel customers in H1 2017. Intel is also talking about Knights Mill, which is the next generation of the Xeon Phi processor family. The company claims that Knights Mill will deliver a 4x increase in deep learning performance compared to existing Xeon Phi processors and the combined solution with Nervana will offer orders of magnitude gains in deep learning performance. "We expect the Intel Nervana platform to produce breakthrough performance and dramatic reductions in the time to train complex neural networks," said Diane Bryant, Executive VP of Intel's Data Center Group. "We expect Nervana's technologies to produce a breakthrough 100-fold increase in performance in the next three years to train complex neural networks, enabling data scientists to solve their biggest AI challenges faster," added Intel CEO Brian Krzanich.
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Intel Lays Roadmap For 100-Fold AI Performance Boost With Nervana and Knights

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  • BeauHD has reversed the blockquote on this. MojoKid wrote the summary and that is blockquoted. Then the actual quoted section from the linked article is not blockquoted. Should be the other way around if consistency is to be observed.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 19, 2016 @06:23AM (#53321003)

    What a load of PHB bean-counter marketoid bullshit.

    "Data scientists" still care jack shit about reality. 90% of today's "machine learning" [sic] work is about justifying the bias. The rest 10% is about tracking you and taking away your freedom, replacing your reality with an echo chamber, while making you pay for it.

    We expect Nervana's technologies to produce a breakthrough 100-fold increase in performance in the next three years to train complex neural networks, enabling data scientists to solve their biggest AI challenges faster

    100x faster generation of bullshit still achieves nothing but bullshit. It's not about always about how fast you do it.

    • replacing your reality with an echo chamber

      So, it's a Slashdot replacement? In that case, booo!

  • Amazon (where Musk's OPen AI went) and Google already have a huge investment in focusing on video cards. Force them to use a new kind of logic and it will go really slow. Instead focus on the other technology driver. Get ten AAA games to advertise support for this card (with results visible in the game) and you'll kickstart development and sell fifty thousand units, while having the first new "must have" since Phys-X was folded in to graphics cards.
  • Neural Nets? What is this, the 1940s? All this AI "research" and neural nets are the best they can come up with? What a joke.
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      Whats wrong with neural nets, its the only known technique that can produce programs capable of performing tasks a programmer doesn't know how to do. Deepmind programmers were not in fact better Go players than the world champion, but with neurals nets they did indeed produce a program that beat the world champion. That's pretty awesome, its one thing to use a machine to do something faster than a human can, its completely different thing do use a machine to do what human doesn't know how to do.
      • That's pretty awesome, its one thing to use a machine to do something faster than a human can, its completely different thing do use a machine to do what human doesn't know how to do.

        Indeed! I would go so far as to say that if the IBM's Watson/Jeopardy stunt doesn't impress you, then you haven't understood the problem.

      • Whats wrong with neural nets, its the only known technique that can produce programs capable of performing tasks a programmer doesn't know how to do.

        Show some love for Genetic Algorithms. Sure you may have to thoroughly verify that their 'better than a programmer' optimal solution is actually a correct solution but- they have existed for a long time even if as yet unspectacularly leveraged (in publicly visible ways that would have made them rank in your book)

    • What is this, the 1940s? All this AI "research" and neural nets are the best they can come up with?

      After 4 billion years of evolution, neural nets are also the best that natural intelligence has come up with.

  • Sounds like a rock group

    Do the Knights include Sir Elton John, Sir Paul Macartney and Sir Rod Stewart?

    "We'll kill the fathead, coughed the knight, so stick around"

    • Also, consider that the AES instructions [wikipedia.org] are called AES-NI (new instructions) in Intel parlance. So I wonder if these new chips feature something like Knights-NI.

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