Intel AI portfolio additions include 3rd-Gen Xeon processor

Market news | June 22, 2020

By Ally Winning

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The solutions are designed to enable customers to accelerate the development and use of artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics workloads running in data center, network, and intelligent-edge environments. The new 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable processors, says the company, is the industry’s first mainstream server processor with built-in bfloat16 support, making AI inference and training more widely deployable on general-purpose CPUs for applications that include image classification, recommendation engines, speech recognition, and language modeling.

“The ability to rapidly deploy AI and data analytics is essential for today’s businesses,” says Lisa Spelman, Intel corporate vice president and general manager, Xeon and Memory Group. “We remain committed to enhancing built-in AI acceleration and software optimizations within the processor that powers the world’s data center and edge solutions, as well as delivering an unmatched silicon foundation to unleash insight from data.”

Bfloat16 is a compact numeric format that uses half the bits as today’s FP32 format but achieves comparable model accuracy with minimal – if any – software changes required. The addition of bfloat16 support, says the company, accelerates both AI training and inference performance in the CPU.

Intel-optimized distributions for leading deep learning frameworks (including TensorFlow and Pytorch) support bfloat16 and are available through the company’s AI Analytics toolkit. Intel also delivers bfloat16 optimizations into its OpenVINO toolkit and the ONNX Runtime environment to ease inference deployments.

The 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors – code-named “Cooper Lake” – evolve the company’s four- and eight-socket processor offering. The processor is designed for deep learning, virtual machine (VM) density, in-memory database, mission-critical applications and analytics-intensive workloads. Customers refreshing aging infrastructure, says the company, can expect an average estimated gain of 1.9 times on popular workloads3 and up to 2.2 times more VMs4 compared with five-year-old four-socket platform equivalents.

The company also announced the following other additions to the its hardware and software AI portfolio:

New Intel Optane persistent memory: As part of the 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable platform, the company also announced the Intel Optane persistent memory 200 series, providing customers up to 4.5TB of memory per socket to manage data intensive workloads, such as in-memory databases, dense virtualization, analytics and high-powered computing.
New Intel 3D NAND SSDs: For systems that store data in all-flash arrays, Intel announced the availability of its next-generation high-capacity Intel 3D NAND SSDs, the Intel SSD D7-P5500 and P5600. These 3D NAND SSDs are built with Intel’s latest triple-level cell (TLC) 3D NAND technology and an all-new low-latency PCIe controller to meet the intense IO requirements of AI and analytics workloads and advanced features to improve IT efficiency and data security.
First Intel AI-optimized FPGA: The company disclosed its upcoming Intel Stratix 10 NX FPGAs – its first AI-optimized FPGAs targeted for high-bandwidth, low-latency AI acceleration. These FPGAs will offer customers customizable, reconfigurable and scalable AI acceleration for compute-demanding applications such as natural language processing and fraud detection. Intel Stratix 10 NX FPGAs include integrated high-bandwidth memory (HBM), high-performance networking capabilities and new AI-optimized arithmetic blocks called AI Tensor Blocks, which contain dense arrays of lower-precision multipliers typically used for AI model arithmetic.
OneAPI cross-architecture development for ongoing AI innovation: As Intel expands its advanced AI product portfolio to meet diverse customer needs, it is also paving the way to simplify heterogeneous programming for developers with its oneAPI cross-architecture tools portfolio to accelerate performance and increase productivity. With these advanced tools, developers can accelerate AI workloads across Intel CPUs, GPUs and FPGAs, and future-proof their code for today’s and the next generations of Intel processors and accelerators.
Enhanced Intel Select Solutions portfolio addresses IT’s top requirements: Intel has enhanced its Select Solutions portfolio to accelerate deployment of IT’s most urgent requirements highlighting the value of pre-verified solution delivery in today’s rapidly evolving business climate. Announced today are three new and five enhanced Intel Select Solutions focused on analytics, AI and hyper-converged infrastructure. The enhanced Intel Select Solution for Genomics Analytics is being used around the world to find a vaccine for COVID-19 and the new Intel Select Solution for VMware Horizon VDI on vSAN is being used to enhance remote learning.

The 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors and Optane persistent memory 200 series are shipping now. General OEM systems availability is expected in the second half of 2020. The Intel SSD D7-P5500 and P5600 3D NAND SSDs are available now. The Stratix 10 NX FPGA is expected to be available in the second half of 2020.

Intel