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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 is the vice president of Web & Digital Strategy for 1105's Converge360 Group, where she oversees the front-end Web team and deals with all aspects of digital projects at the company, including launching and running the group's popular virtual summit and Coffee talk series . She an experienced tech journalist (20 years), and before her current position, was the editorial director of the group's sites. A few years ago she gave a talk at a leading technical publishers conference about how changes in Web browser technology would impact online advertising for publishers. Follow her on twitter @beckynagel.