UPDATED 16:30 EDT / JUNE 23 2020

AI

Intel and HPE infuse AI smarts at the server level

Artificial intelligence tops the 2020 technology trend list for good reason. When implemented for appropriate use cases, AI can provide insights and information that boost business efficiency and increase revenue.

“At Intel, we look at AI as a workload and a tool that is becoming ubiquitous across all of our compute solutions,” said Monica Livingston (pictured), artificial intelligence sales director at Intel Corp.

Livingston spoke with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the HPE Discover Virtual Experience event. They discussed how Intel is infusing AI into its base platform and memory solutions. (* Disclosure below.)

AI performance with Intel and HPE reliability

Adding AI performance into Intel’s Deep-Learning Boost feature set in the company’s second-generation Xeon scalable processors gave “up to 30x performance improvement for deep-learning inference on the CPU over the previous generation,” explained Livingston.

This commitment to AI will continue with the third generation scheduled to launch later this month, according to Livingston. “When you are buying the latest and greatest HPE servers, you will have built-in AI performance with Intel Xeon Scalable and Optane for system memory,” she said.

Enabling more customers to be able to run AI at scale is the goal of embedding AI into the base platform, according to Livingston. “AI solutions can get super expensive. You can easily pay two to three times what you should be paying if you don’t have optimized software,” she said.

The ability to run large numbers of AI applications on a base platform eliminates the need to stand up separate infrastructure just for AI. “If you’re looking at classical machine learning, if you’re looking at analytics, deep-learning inference, that can run on a base platform today. And I think that’s what’s important,” Livingston stated.

But AI isn’t always the answer. “You have to make sure that you’re understanding why you’re doing AI,” Livingston said. “If you have a workload that could be easily solved or a problem that could be easily solved with data analytics, use data analytics.”

Other issues to consider before jumping head first into AI include data availability and quality, access to “the resources that are skilled in AI that can get your solution off the ground,” and a post-deployment maintenance program, according to Livingston. Addressing the ethics issue with AI, she discussed contract tracing and facial-recognition systems.

“The technology itself is not that difficult, but the implementation and the use and the governance around it is a lot more complex,” she stated.

Together, HPE and Intel are providing the resources to help businesses navigate the way to an effective and affordable AI implementation.

“Intel works together with HPE to create reference architectures for AI, and we do joint training as well,” she said. “Leveraging your ecosystem is incredibly important because … there are a lot of resources available from independent service vendors to hardware providers to consulting companies that are able to offer support with AI.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the HPE Discover Virtual Experience event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the HPE Discover Virtual Experience. Neither Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE

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