Thursday, August 25, 2016

Intel Fires Back at NVIDIA over Deep Learning

Following Up on "Nvidia Welcomes Intel Into AI Era: Fancy a Benchmark Deathmatch?" (NVDA; INTC).
From Investopedia:

It could be argued that NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) got the back-and-forth started with processor competitor Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) when it published a blog post last week titled, "Correcting Intel's Deep Learning Benchmark Mistakes." The "mistakes" NVIDIA VP of Accelerated Learning Ian Buck was referring to were claims by Intel that its new Xeon Phi processors were more than two times faster than competitive processors, and considerably more scalable.

Buck added fuel to the fire by suggesting that with the rapid pace of change in deep learning systems and architecture, "newcomers to the field may not be aware of all the developments that have been taking place in both hardware and software."

In what can be described as an off-handed response, Jason Waxman, the vice president of Intel's data center group, said in a recent post regarding his company's artificial intelligence push, "While there's been much talk about the value of GPUs for machine learning, the fact is that fewer than 3 percent of all servers deployed for machine learning last year used a GPU."

NVIDIA is the king of GPUs (graphics processing units), so the target of Waxman's rebuke wasn't difficult to recognize....MORE
I like that 'newcomers to the field' line.
NVDA is down 43 cents at $$61.50 and $2.00 below the Aug. 15 all-time high.
INTC is off 7 cents at $35.08.

Here's the Intel response at their blog, Aug. 23:
Intel to Deliver Leading Platform for Artificial Intelligence