If there was any question that machine learning would spawn chip designs aimed specifically at those applications, those doubts were laid to rest this year. The last 12 months have seen a veritable of explosion of silicon built for this new application space.
At the Hot Chips conference this week, Microsoft has revealed its latest deep learning acceleration platform, known as Project Brainwave, which the company claims can deliver real-time AI. The new platform uses Intel's latest Stratix 10 FPGAs.
While AI is poised to sweep through major sectors of the economy over the next decade, perhaps no industry should be more welcoming to this technology than that of healthcare. And given that the US is the most technologically advanced nation in the world, and the one with the most expensive healthcare, the country could end up being the proving ground for AI-powered medicine.
Microsoft has bought Cycle Computing, an established provider of cloud orchestration tools for high performance computing users. The acquisition offers the prospect of tighter integration between Microsoft Azures infrastructure and Cycles software, but suggests an uncertain future for the technology on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Googles cloud platform.
One of the biggest impediments to more widespread use of AI is the lack of developer expertise in machine learning software. Bonsai, a startup based in Berkeley, California, is looking to change that in a big way by offering a platform that abstracts away a lot of the low-level nuts and bolts that makes machine learning such a daunting challenge for businesses.
This week IBM demonstrated software that was able to significantly boost the speed of training deep neural networks, while improving the accuracy of those networks. The software achieved this by dramatically increasing the scalability of these training applications across large number of GPUs.
The Chinese government has released a three-phase plan to become the world leader in artificial intelligence. According to a document published by the countrys State Council, the development and deployment of AI is seen as a strategic opportunity to the country, and will be worth 10 trillion yuan (1.49 trillion USD) to the nations economy by 2030.
While a number of commentators have written off AMDs prospects of competing against Intel in HPC, testing of the latest server silicon from each chipmaker has revealed that the EPYC chip offers some surprising performance advantages against Intels newest "Skylake" Xeon destined for the datacenter.
A report published by James Kisner, an equity analyst at global investment banking firm Jeffries, shot a few holes in IBMs Watson and the companys cognitive computing strategy. Along the way, Kisner offered some interesting insights into the AI market and some of the major players competing in the space.
After already shipping more than half a million of its next-generation Xeon products to customers, Intel officially launched its new Xeon scalable processor product line. The chipmaker is calling it the biggest data center advancement in a decade.
