Nvidia Introduces New AI-Based Chips To Take On Intel

Intel hasn’t lost hope despite the declining PC market and not seeing much success in making chips for smartphones. Rather, it has found a new field of growth — artificial intelligence — but it is not the only company to pursue this new tech. On Monday, rival Nvidia announced new processors for embedding its products in artificial-intelligence systems that are very much in demand these days.

Intel by Roebot, Flickr

Intel vs. Nvidia: the AI war

Intel announced its AI chips last month and also discussed its ambition to muscle in on this nascent but fast-growing market. Following this, Nvidia, the leader in video gaming, rolled out graphics chips for running software that will make split-second decisions. It is of utmost importance, as everything from phones to cars to Internet search engines respond to inputs such as speech, moving objects and images, reports Bloomberg.

Nvidia’s new Tesla P4 chip is meant for servers used in massive data centers. According to Nvidia, P4 processes images three times faster than its predecessor, and its efficiency is 40 times more than Intel’s server chips. There is yet another chip named P40 that has been designed for more powerful single computers such as supercomputers, the media outlet notes.

With such chips,Intel and Nvidia intend to make sure that data center operators such as Google use their technology and are not motivated to design their own custom solutions, notes Bloomberg.

The market for AI chips is in its early days as of now. Sales in Nvidia’s data center business more than doubled in the latest quarter and were reported at $151 million, most of which came from AI tasks. On the other hand, Intel’s data center unit reported sales of $4 billion, but AI projects contributed much less.

What is Intel’s Coffee Lake for the PC market?

Along with AI, Intel is also reportedly working on a desktop and high-performance notebook processor family known as Coffee Lake, which could come by late 2017 of early 2018, reported PC Watch previously. The enhancements that the chip maker will make to Coffee Lake are not known, but PC Watch did mention a few of them. There will be three variants of Coffee Lake: two, four and six cores. Intel’s current desktop processors go up to four processor cores.