Today, Intel launched and disclosed new technologies across its portfolio of processors, with special emphasis on enhanced AI capabilities. Unlike its many competitors, who either produce a CPU, a GPU, an FPGA or an AI-specific accelerator, Intel’s strategy is “all of the above.” The company offers customers a range of solutions, from general purpose to …
The annual International Supercomputer Conference (ISC), held virtually this year, kicked off today. Not surprisingly, NVIDIA has already made a few announcements of note. Especially of interest to me was the announcement of Selene, NVIDIA’s in-house 1+ Exaflop AI supercomputer, which ranks as the fastest industrial system in the USA and #7 overall in the …
Software for new processor designs is critical to enabling application deployment and optimizing performance. UK-based startup Graphcore, the unicorn provider of silicon for application acceleration, places significant emphasis on software, dedicating roughly half its engineering staff to the challenge. Graphcore’s Intelligence Processing Unit (IPU) utilizes the expression of an algorithm as a directed graph, and …
Microsoft has announced that the company has built a top 5 AI supercomputer for OpenAI, hosted in the Azure cloud. Microsoft invested a billion dollars in the OpenAI industry research group in 2019. The massive system is comprised of some 10,000 GPUs and over 285,000 CPU cores and will be used to advance the industry’s …
Microsoft Builds Massive Supercomputer For OpenAI, But Whose Chips Are Inside? Read More »
While many of us missed watching Jensen Huang on stage in his trademark leather jacket, he did not disappoint his on-line audience at the virtual GTC Keynote this week. In a session lasting over two and a half hours, the CEO and founder of NVIDIA announced new hardware to fend off a slew of potential …
NVIDIA Launches Ampere A100 GPU For Data Center Computing And AI Read More »
Software for new processor designs is critical to enabling application deployment and optimizing performance. UK-based startup Graphcore, a provider of silicon for application acceleration, places significant emphasis on software, dedicating roughly half its engineering staff to the challenge. Graphcore’s Intelligence Processing Unit (IPU) utilizes the expression of an algorithm as a directed graph, and the company’s Poplar software stack …
RESEARCH PAPER: The Graphcore Software Stack: Built To Scale Read More »
With so many startups and large semiconductor firms racing to get new AI chips to market, electronic tool and design service firms like Synopsys, Cadence and Mentor Graphics are looking for new approaches to help designers speed their time to market. Ironically, one of the approaches being taken is to use AI to help build …
The US arsenal of supercomputers has officially been opened up for COVID-19 research. The White House recently announced the new COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium, which will allow researchers worldwide to access to the world’s most powerful HPC resources and leverage them to combat the novel coronavirus. The White House believes that these high performance computing …
Putting HPC To Work To Accelerate COVID-19 Research Read More »
What the heck is that you ask? So, did I; but it looks promising! I continue to be amazed at the innovations that are coming to market to accelerate deep learning workloads. GraphCore, Habana Labs, Cerebras, Blaize, Groq, Perceive and others are now being joined by a new entrant with radically new ideas: Tenstorrent out …
Tenstorrent Launches AI Chip With Conditional Execution Read More »
It goes without saying that designing complex semiconductors is an extremely challenging engineering process. While the chips themselves are small, and the individual features on the chips are tiny, as small as 7 nanometers (seven billionths of a meter), the intricacy of the design process is astronomical. You can download the paper by clicking on …
RESEARCH PAPER: AI Could Be The Next Killer App In Semiconductor Design Read More »
While the IBM hardware business today is limited to POWER and Mainframe chips and systems, the technology giant is quietly building its expertise and capabilities in AI hardware. Where this could end up is anybody’s guess, but here are a few thoughts about what IBM is doing and speculation as to why. IBM research in …
Intel certainly has a lot of irons in the AI fireplace, including Xeon CPUs, Movidius computer vision chips, MobileEye chips for autonomous driving and Deep Neural Network training and inference processing technology from the newly acquired Habana Labs. With all of this going on, one might wonder why Intel is pursuing yet another approach—neuromorphic computing. …
Why Intel Is Investing In Neuromorphic Computing Read More »
Last fall, as Cray was being acquired by Hewlett-Packard Enterprise for $1.6B, the company announced that it had been selected by the US DOE for two more exa-scale supercomputers based on the processor-agnostic Cray Shasta architecture. The Lawrence Livermore National Labs (LLNL) El Capitan supercomputer, costing some $600M, and planned for 2023, will be based …
AMD To Power ‘El Capitan’ Super Computer From HPE’s Cray Read More »
The CPU in today’s data center is increasingly burdened by the need to process networking jobs. According to Xilinx’s VP Marketing for Data Center Products, Donna Yasay, networking stacks can tax CPUs up to 30%, robbing them of the cycles needed to run users’ applications. Tier 1 cloud service providers have invested in custom ASICs …
As we approach NVIDIA’s annual GPU Technology Conference, everyone is anxious to see what CEO Jensen Huang has up his trademark black leather sleeves. I have no idea, but as usual, I have an opinion. An intro to GTC GTC is NVIDIA’s partners’ big annual opportunity to show off and explain how they leverage …
NVIDIA reported renewed growth overall last week. Its Data Center segment (where most of the AI hardware is reported) grew 43% to a record $968M in the last quarter, and gaming rose 56% to $1.49 billion. The stock market appreciated the news, sending NVIDIA up over 6%, and many analysts revised their price targets higher. …
Last week, I reported that Intel plans to switch its AI acceleration from Nervana technology to Habana Labs, which it acquired in December. Since Intel had planned to bring out both the inference and the training versions of Nervana’s second generation, this came as quite a surprise to many in the industry. I just got an update from …
Last month, Intel announced that it would acquire Israeli AI chip startup Habana Labs for $2B. At the time, I opined that this probably spelled the end for chips from the 2016 Nervana acquisition. Intel planned to bring out both the inference and the training versions of Nervana’s second attempt to out-perform NVIDIA by the end of …
Qualcomm has been innovating artificial intelligence (AI) features for years in their Snapdragon products, and the next generation Snapdragon 865 & 765 5G Mobile Platform, due in 2020, are designed to take AI performance to the next level and enable distributed intelligence over 5G wireless. AI is becoming ubiquitous on smartphones, and although many consumers …
RESEARCH PAPER: Qualcomm’s New Distributed Intelligence Platform Read More »
In a strategic move in its datacenter AI plans, Intel has announced that it will acquire Israeli chip startup Habana Labs for $2 billion. Intel had reaffirmed its plans to deliver its Nervana chips as recently as last month, but the acquisition of Habana likely signals that early lighthouse accounts preferred the startup’s approach over …
