CES 2019: Intel Teams Up With Facebook For AI Chip

Chip giant Intel has revealed at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that it is working with Facebook on an artificial intelligence (AI) chip.

The development will see Intel competing directly with rival AI chips from the likes of Amazon Web Services and Nvidia.

Meanwhile Intel has also revealed that Dell Technologies will feature Intel’s much delayed next generation 10-nanometer chips in its XPS line of laptops.

AI move

Intel apparently plans to deliver the new artificial intelligence chip in the second half of this year, according to Reuters.

It quoted the new chip as being designed to deal with ‘inference’, which for example would see an artificial intelligence algorithm automatically by tagging friends in photos.

Facebook of course is already a big user of AI, which it uses to catch prohibited content, tag people in photos and translate posts into other languages.

The Intel processor aims to run pre-trained machine-learning algorithms more efficiently. Essentially the thinking is that the new AI chip that should make it cheaper for big companies to use artificial intelligence.

In other CES news Intel also said that Dell’s XPS line of laptops will soon feature the firm’s much delayed 10-nanometer chips.

Intel had originally predicted the 10nm Cannon Lake chips would be ready by 2015, but a sluggish PC market coupled with production problems meant that Intel’s next generation chips will now only be available in late 2019.

Car tech

Meanwhile Intel also at the CES show opened up about its move into self-driving cars.

Amnon Shashua, the head of Intel’s Mobileye self-driving car computer division, said Mobileye has mapped out all of the roadways in Japan, using cameras that were already embedded in vehicles produced by Nissan.

It has also announced a new partnership with Ordnance Survey, to map the United Kingdom for the autonomous vehicles (AV).

Shashua also revealed that Mobileye has also developed the Responsibility-Sensitive Safety (RSS) mathematical approach to safer AV decision-making.

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