Intel has introduced its 3rd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors and additions to its hardware and software AI portfolio, enabling customers to accelerate the development and use of artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics workloads running in data center, network and intelligent-edge environments.
As the industry’s first mainstream server processor with built-in bfloat16 support, Intel’s new 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable processors makes 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. 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,” said, Lisa Spelman, Intel corporate vice president and general manager, Xeon and Memory Group.
Why It’s Important: AI and analytics open new opportunities for customers across a broad range of industries, including finance, healthcare, industrial, telecom and transportation. IDC predicts that by 2021, 75% of commercial enterprise apps will use AI. And by 2025, IDC estimates that roughly a quarter of all data generated will be created in real time, with various internet of things (IoT) devices creating 95% of that volume growth.
Unequaled Portfolio Breadth and Ecosystem Support for AI and Analytics: Intel’s new data platforms, coupled with a thriving ecosystem of partners using Intel AI technologies, are optimized for businesses to monetize their data through the deployment of intelligent AI and analytics services.
· New 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable Processors: Intel is further extending its investment in built-in AI acceleration in the new 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors through the integration of bfloat16 support into the processor’s unique Intel DL Boost® technology.
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 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 Intel 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 Intel’s 4- and 8-socket processor offering. The processor is designed for deep learning, virtual machine (VM) density, in-memory database, mission-critical applications and analytics-intensive workloads.
