The transformative power of artificial intelligence and its impact on various industries have been at the forefront of technological advancements.

Lisa Spelman (pictured), corporate vice president and general manager of Xeon products at Intel Corp., recently shared valuable insights on Intel’s fourth-generation Xeon processor and its role in accelerating AI adoption while catering to diverse customer workloads.

“We’ve built it this way to satisfy all of our customers’ requirements,” Spelman said. “This gives people so much flexibility and the chance to use it for virtually any workload.”

Spelman spoke with theCUBE industry analysts Dave Vellante and Lisa Martin at HPE Discover, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the flexibility and performance of Xeon, the importance of narrowing the scope of AI applications and Intel’s commitment to sustainability and data security. (* Disclosure below.)

Unleashing the power of the Xeon processor

The fourth-generation Xeon processor is designed to cater to a wide range of enterprise requirements, spanning from networks and cloud environments to data centers and edge computing. The processor’s flexibility enables it to handle virtually any workload, according to Spelman.

One of the key highlights of the fourth-gen Xeon processor is its integrated accelerator engines, strategically placed within the chip to significantly enhance performance for various workloads. These workloads include for networks, artificial intelligence, databases and analytics.

“If you think of all the things that really require tons of data and a lot of data movement, that’s where we focused our acceleration efforts,” Spelman said, explaining why the focus of the processor is on optimizing data movement.

Driving AI innovation

AI has become a central focus across industries, with an explosive growth that requires the tools to manage it. Intel’s fourth-generation Xeon processor offers substantial performance improvements for AI workloads, with some experiencing a remarkable 10x performance improvement and performance per watt gain compared to previous generations, according to Spelman.

There is a differentiation between AI workloads, considering factors such as real-time requirements. Some examples of this include in healthcare and autonomous vehicles, where the need for instantaneous decision-making varies.

“We look at it from both sides of which type of AI you’re accelerating, and we either make chip-level decisions or what we call system-level decisions. We’re really trying to solve for both,” Spelman explained.

The concept of total cost of ownership is also important. While performance improvements are crucial, factors such as power consumption and memory costs play significant roles in TCO. Intel’s fourth-generation Xeon processor aims to balance power and performance while increasing memory utilization efficiency. By reducing power consumption and optimizing performance, Intel helps organizations manage costs effectively while maintaining high-performance computing capabilities, Spelman explained.

“We’re delivering an average 55% TCO benefit generation over generation, while also increasing the ability to service that memory,” she added.

Sustainability and data security are integral aspects of Intel’s discussions with customers, as well as the company’s commitment to sustainable manufacturing practices, including the use of renewable energy. Furthermore, Intel introduced power optimization in it’s fourth-gen Xeon processor.

“In deployment, we seek to increase performance and hold that power the same,” Spelman said. “In this generation, we introduced something called Optimized Power Mode, which gives customers the opportunity to take a very slight performance hit for a huge power savings. The reason you offer that is because not every single application needs to operate at max performance all the time.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of HPE Discover:

(* Disclosure: Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. and Intel Corp. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither HPE and Intel nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE