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Intel Goes for Edge AI Market with New Releases

Earlier in November Intel announced several new initiatives aimed at advancing artificial intelligence (AI) processing on the edge.

One big announcement in this line is its upcoming Intel Movidius VPU chip -- code-named Keem Bay -- that's "scheduled to be available in the first half of 2020."

Because these chips are low-power, they're ideal for edge computing environments, wrote Jonathan Ballon, vice president of Intel's Internet of Things Group, in a blog.

Intel is referring to the chips as having "the power of an SOC [system on a chip] in an AI accelerator."

"Rather than taking products designed for another purpose, we are engineering specifically for edge inference," Ballon continued.

Note that Intel says the new edge chips will be designed to be used with a brand-new developer service, Intel DevCloud on the Edge. What this service does is bring the Intel DevCloud and Intel's OpenVINO toolkit together with reference implementations and training models to help enterprises better and more easily implement edge- and AI-related projects.

"OpenVINO is a dev tool [and] runtime to enable customers to write once and deploy across a wide variety of Intel silicon at maximum performance," Ballon commented. "Our new Dev Cloud for the Edge...makes AI accessible to everyone, not just the experts and companies with fleets of data scientists."

About the Author

Becky Nagel serves as vice president of AI for 1105 Media specializing in developing media, events and training for companies around AI and generative AI technology. She also regularly writes and reports on AI news, and is the founding editor of PureAI.com. She's the author of "ChatGPT Prompt 101 Guide for Business Users" and other popular AI resources with a real-world business perspective. She regularly speaks, writes and develops content around AI, generative AI and other business tech. Find her on X/Twitter @beckynagel.

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