Intel unveils 'Spring Hill' - its first artificial intelligence chip
Facebook has already started using Intel's new 'Spring Hill' AI chip, according to Intel
Intel has unveiled its first artificial intelligence (AI) chip, named 'Spring Hill' or Nervana NNP-I 1000, at the HotChips symposium for high-performance chips at Stanford University in California.
The chip, based on a 10nm Ice Lake processor and developed at Intel's development facility in Haifa, Israel, is intended for large computing centres.
According to Intel, Facebook has already started using its first AI chip. "In order to reach a future situation of 'AI everywhere', we have to deal with huge amounts of data generated and make sure organisations are equipped with what they need to make effective use of the data and process them where they are collected," said Naveen Rao, general manager of Intel's artificial intelligence products group, according to Reuters.
"These computers need acceleration for complex AI applications," he added.
Intel claims its Nervana NNP-I chip arose from its $120 million investment in three Israeli AI startups, including NeuroBlade and Habana Labs.
The company also expects the AI chip to run alongside Intel Xeon-based servers in large companies as the need for complex computations in the AI field increases in near future.
According to Intel, Nervana NNP-I offers the best in class performance/power efficiency (4.8 TOPs/W) for major data centre workloads. It also 5x power scaling for the performance boost, the company said.
The on-die Intel architecture cores enable the chip to achieve a high degree of programmability without compromising power efficiency/performance.
A broad set of reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS) features ensure that the chip can be easily deployed in existing data centres, Intel claims. Moreover, Nervana NNP-I also comes with highly capable SW stack able to support all major DL frameworks.
Other main features of Nervana NNP-I are:
- 12x Inference Compute Engines;
- Intel IA cores with AVX and VNNI;
- 4×32, 2×64 LPDDR4x;
- Dynamic power management and FIVR technology;
- 24MB LLC for fast Inter ICE and IA data sharing;
- Hardware-based sync for ICE to ICE communication;
- Total SRAM (75 MB);
- DRAM BW (68 GB/s); and,
- Next two generations in planning/design.
Neural network processors (NNP) refers to a family of neural processors being developed by Intel Nervana for acceleration of artificial intelligence workloads.
The design of these chips was initially originated by Nervana before it was acquired by Intel in 2016.
At the HotChips event, Intel also unveiled Lakefield, its first product that uses its 3D stacking and IA hybrid computing architecture.
The company also announced that it is now shipping in volume Intel Optane DC persistent memory, which further bridges the gap between storage and memory.