Integrating artificial intelligence could be a long and arduous process for many companies, but Intel Corp. is presenting itself as the solution for companies wanting to adapt to existing infrastructure. Democratizing AI for customers who cannot afford to rip out existing systems is a core part of the company’s strategy, according to Brett Hannath (pictured), corporate vice president and chief marketing officer of Intel.

Intel’s Brett Hannath discusses the company’s ongoing collaboration with HPE.

“What we’re trying to do is bring AI compute power into architectures people already understand, know and use today,” he said. “Rather than having to go retrain all these infrastructure teams that you talked about, you can actually leverage the architectures that you have today … We really are just trying to play that role in the AI space. So, it’s not just the high end with the people with the large wallets.”

Hannath spoke with theCUBE Research’s Dave Vellante and John Furrier at HPE Discover, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed Intel’s partnership with HPE and how the silicon industry is evolving. (* Disclosure below.)

Adapting old infrastructure to a new era by democratizing AI

Intel has announced its sixth generation of Xeon E-core processors and is already preparing to release Xeon 18A, or “Clearwater Forest,” the company’s first processor in the angstrom era. In producing new generations of processors, Intel aims to beat the competition while maintaining its close partnership with Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. and supporting HPE’s ProLiant servers.

“[With HPE] we’ve just got this huge road map of opportunity for performance and energy compute that goes into these industry standard racks to distribute and run AI models, for example. So the engineering and design work [are] incredibly close and aligned, which is fantastic,” said Hannath. “The gen compute space, the data center refresh that’s happening now, I think they’re areas where you’ll see HPE and Intel work really closely together.”

Intel, which has already optimized over 500 open source models on its hardware, is focusing on use cases that give a wider range of users the opportunity to harness AI. The company’s Tiber Edge Platform is AI enabled and the company’s Core Ultra Processors allow PC users to run AI applications.

“If we take these open-source models that are pre-trained to your industry, your type of enterprise, and then we can run it on our infrastructure as is today with the new features that we’re implementing, then really we can start to run these models on the standard infrastructure,” Hannath said. “If you’re running a model that’s been trained on someone else’s data that is many, many years old, we need to embed today’s data and your enterprise data to make this stuff more valuable.”

Intel has deep roots in the hardware industry, and despite competition from other processor giants such as Nvidia Corp., Hannath believes the company is perfectly positioned to transform the silicon industry. Intel’s goal of democratizing AI extends from business infrastructure to manufacturing.

“This continuum of compute, cloud, data center, edge, PC is what we’re trying to optimize for everyone,” he said. “What we’ve done is invested literally tens of billions, up to a hundred billion worth, into just the manufacturing capability of silicon … If we can bring manufacturing back to the US, which we are, if we can stabilize the silicon supply chain, that’s one advantage that only Intel can really bring just because of the capital and infrastructure that we have.”

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

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for HPE Discover. Neither Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. and Intel Corp., the primary sponsors of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE