Thursday, August 9, 2018

Scenes From Intel's Data-Centric Innovation Summit (INTC)

From The Register, August 8:

Intel: Yeah, yeah, 10nm. It's on the todo list. Now, let's talk about AI.
At Intel's Data-Centric Innovation Summit today in Santa Clara, California, Chipzilla reiterated its commitment to deliver 10nm Xeon processors in 2020, to maintain its market leadership, and to adapt its silicon to AI-oriented workloads.

That'll be the same 10nm that's years and years late, with manufacturing nightmares hampering the rollout of initial 10nm parts. Desktop processors using the long-awaited process node are due to arrive in volume in 2019, and now Xeon server CPUs the following year – fingers crossed.
Over the past few hours, Intel's execs have attempted to paint a rosy picture without once mentioning their resurgent rival, AMD. They insisted Chipzilla is broadening its portfolio beyond the processor market. In theory, that would make its chip lithography woes less relevant.

Navin Shenoy, executive vice-president and general manager of Intel's data center group, said the first units of Intel's Optane DC persistent memory shipped on Tuesday, headed for Google to power its cloud business. Optane DC, Intel claims, can provide eight-times the performance of DRAM for some analytics queries.

Invited on stage, Bart Sano, platforms veep at Google, expressed appreciation for Intel's long partnership and eagerness to try out the new kit. "I can't wait to get this into the data center to torture it," said Sano.

"And we can't wait for the first checks," Shenoy replied....
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