At a gathering of industry influencers, Intel this week welcomed the next wave of artificial intelligence with updates on new products designed to accelerate AI system development and deployment from cloud to edge.

Intel demonstrated its Intel® Nervana™ Neural Network Processors (NNP) for training (NNP-T1000) and inference (NNP-I1000) — Intel’s first purpose-built ASICs for complex deep learning with incredible scale and efficiency for cloud and data centre customers. Intel also revealed its next-generation Intel® Movidius™ Vision Processing Unit (VPU) for edge media, computer vision and inference applications.

“With this next phase of AI, we’re reaching a breaking point in terms of computational hardware and memory. Purpose-built hardware like Intel® Nervana™ NNPs and Movidius VPUs are necessary to continue the incredible progress in AI. Using more advanced forms of system-level AI will help us move from the conversion of data into information toward the transformation of information into knowledge.”

Naveen Rao, Intel corporate vice president and general manager of the Intel Artificial Intelligence Products Group

Now in production and being delivered to customers, the new Intel Nervana NNPs are part of a systems-level AI approach offering a full software stack developed with open components and deep learning framework integration for maximum use.

The Intel Nervana NNP-T strikes the right balance between computing, communication and memory, allowing near-linear, energy-efficient scaling from small clusters up to the largest pod supercomputers. The Intel Nervana NNP-I is power- and budget-efficient and ideal for running intense, multimodal inference at real-world scale using flexible form factors. Both products were developed for the AI processing needs of leading-edge AI customers like Baidu and Facebook.