I had the pleasure to check out Intel’s first AI days in Europe. At ICM in Munich, Intel presented their latest advancements in Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning in both hardware and software. As one of the biggest player in the hardware industry, they talked a lot about the next wave Xeon CPUs called Lake Crest, that is optimized for Deep Learning. Furthermore, a representative of Nervana Systems introduced their deep learning platform, which has been acquired by Intel for more than 400 Mio. USD in October 2016.
Intel AI Days 2017 Kick-off
Additionally, they talked a lot about low-level optimizations that they have done in order to accelerate many deep learning using Intel hardware, such as (Intel Math Kernel Library (MKL)). In some examples, they shows amazing improvements by a factor of up to 400. This sounds to good to be true in my ears, but even half of that is more than welcome! They presented their Neon framework, which feels to be in between TensorFlow and Keras, as well as a high-level and simple to use Intel Deep Learning SDK for non-programmers. The latter one is currently only suitable for image data. Along with this presentations, me and some others in the audience felt a little bit confused why Intel presents several deep learnings frameworks, and why not just focuses on a single one.
Intel Deep Learning SDK
One last thing that kept in my mind after both days: bar charts, bar charts and even more bar charts. Intel kind of really loves bar charts. I couldn’t stand them any longer after a while, especially because of their redundancy from one presentation to the next. Nevertheless, I’m excited if consumer market CPUs will also benefit from these advancements in the near future.
All presentation slides can be found on Inteldevconference.