Intel unveils AI-driven 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable chips, memory

Chip giant Intel on Thursday unveiled new 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors and additions to its hardware and software AI portfolio.

The new chip, memory, storage and FPGA solutions would help customers accelerate the development and use of AI and analytics workloads running in data centre, network and intelligent-edge environments.

"We remain committed to enhancing built-in AI acceleration and software optimisations within the processor that powers the world's data center and edge solutions, as well as delivering an unmatched silicon foundation to unleash insight from data," said Lisa Spelman, Intel corporate vice president and general manager, Xeon and Memory Group.

The 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors and Intel Optane persistent memory 200 series would ship to customers from Thursday.

As the industry's first mainstream server processor with built-in bfloat16 support, the new 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable processors makes AI inference and training more widely deployable on general-purpose CPUs for apps that include image classification, recommendation engines, speech recognition and language modeling.

Intel said it is extending its investment in built-in AI acceleration in the new 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors through the integration of bfloat16 (Brain Floating Point) support into the processor's unique Intel DL Boost technology.

Bfloat16 is a compact numeric format that uses half the bits as today's FP32 format but achieves comparable model accuracy with minimal - if any - software changes required.

The addition of bfloat16 support accelerates both AI training and inference performance in the CPU, said the company.

As part of the 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable platform, the company also announced the Intel Optane persistent memory 200 series, providing customers up to 4.5TB of memory per socket to manage data intensive workloads.

For systems that store data in all-flash arrays, Intel announced the availability of its next-generation high-capacity Intel 3D NAND SSDs, the Intel SSD D7-P5500 and P5600.

Intel also disclosed its upcoming Intel Stratix 10 NX FPGAs, Intel's first AI-optimized FPGAs targeted for high-bandwidth, low-latency AI acceleration.

In May, Facebook announced that 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors are the foundation for its newest Open Compute Platform (OCP) servers.

Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent have announced they are adopting the next-generation processors, said Intel.