Intel Innovations Simplify and Accelerate "AI Everywhere"

Artificial intelligence (AI) is advancing at a quickening pace as public- and private-sector organizations everywhere embrace its adoption – and in doing so, start to reshape the future of the world.

AI has now expanded beyond mainstream queries to ChatGPT as companies explore practical applications for generative AI (GenAI), harnessing its power to obtain greater data insights, create richer user engagements, and drive amazing technological breakthroughs. Soon, every company will be an AI company, touching all aspects of business and life, advancing the human experience across a universe of devices – from cloud and data center to desktop and laptop, phone, wristwatch, security surveillance, and infinitum.

Fueling AI's hyper-acceleration are a host of recently announced scalable compute technologies, as well as the establishment of a broader, more robust ecosystem, and greater infrastructure flexibility to match the required performance resources to specific AI workload demands. Some organizations have been slow to implement AI due to the perceived complexity and lack of understanding about how to use AI to accelerate their business and capabilities. Now they'll find that those barriers are going away, simplifying AI adoption and delivering its benefits for the good of all.

World Wide Technology (WWT) would like to share some recent and coming developments that are enabling 'AI Everywhere' now and tomorrow.

A new portfolio that simplifies and accelerates AI with industry-ready apps  

During its recent Intel Vision event in Phoenix, longtime WWT technology ally Intel introduced an array of hardware and software products and initiatives designed to realize our shared 'AI Everywhere' vision.

One key announcement was the creation of the Intel® Tiber™ portfolio, a comprehensive suite of enterprise software, services and solutions for AI, edge, and cloud, as well as trust and security. This portfolio brings together a number of AI initiatives beneath a single umbrella, including:

• Intel® SceneScape, an AI-powered software platform that derives spatial awareness from multiple sensors to provide live updates to a 4D digital twin of a customer's physical space. With this capability, digital twins of the space can be used to review its past analytics, track what's happening in real time, and make predictive decisions.
• The Intel® Geti™ platform, offering software for building computer vision models in a fraction of the time required by other options, using less data. This platform streamlines data labeling, model training and optimization tasks throughout the development and export process.
• Intel® Tiber™ Trust and Security solutions help organizations protect data, verify workloads, and stay compliant from cloud to edge. It allows you to establish and sustain trust in multi-party collaboration for AI while safeguarding workloads and verifying their integrity in real time.

By consolidating these previously discrete offerings into a single portfolio, Intel is providing a unified experience that will streamline deployment of enterprise software and services for AI, making it easier to define the ideal solution for a customer's situation that satisfies the needs for security, compliance and performance – all while controlling costs.

WWT sees a clear customer benefit from this consolidation, enabling us to offer industry-ready apps that relieve customers of the burden of designing apps themselves, making their own models or relying on pre-trained models. Instead, WWT can work with customers to accelerate AI by applying our own expertise, moving rapidly to leverage the tools in this portfolio for a range of AI use cases.

New processors that right-size AI infrastructure with flexible architecture

Previously, the AI ambitions of many organizations were constrained by lack of choices, whether from vendor lock-in or from limited AI-capable compute options. In some cases, the "solution" employed more CPU and/or GPU horsepower, cost and complexity than was required. The purchase and deployment of an improperly sized solution not only delivers limited ROI, it can also create additional data center power and cooling challenges.

Fortunately, that dilemma will be resolved with the rollout of exciting new products such as the rebranded Intel® Xeon® 6 processor for data centers, cloud and edge. Launching later this year, the Intel Xeon 6 processor will be available in two variants: Performance-cores (P-cores) for demanding workloads like inference and training, and Efficient-cores (E-cores) for low power consumption such as edge or web tier applications.

Matching energy consumption to the workload is more essential than ever. Collectively, the two variants of Intel Xeon 6 processor offer new levels of flexibility for AI applications, including Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to optimize the output of large language models beyond their data source training, delivering more specific results from company data without having to retrain the model.

With these two options, WWT can work with customers to choose the right processor for specific workloads – right-sizing to each use case and avoiding past challenges – benefitting from a new flexible architecture that can address nearly any AI application or need.

The Intel Xeon 6 processor promises to establish a new standard for data center performance, security, simplification and scalability. We look forward to exploring its capabilities later this year in WWT's Advanced Technology Center (ATC), our multi-campus R&D facility for demos, labs, proofs of concept, and more.

Creating a broad ecosystem to enable next-gen AI performance and choice

For organizations that have been slow to adopt AI because of limited OEM support, the coming release of Intel® Gaudi® 3 AI accelerator will resolve their hesitation. With support from Intel® Tiber™ Developer Cloud, this high-performance accelerator brings openness and choice, offering superior AI compute capability and memory bandwidth. The result is a significant leap in AI training and inference for deploying AI at scale.

Intel Gaudi 3 AI accelerator will have much broader ecosystem support with a variety of OEM options, including Dell coming later this year, so you can match your preferred compute vendor with this acceleration solution. As an organization's AI needs move beyond what a CPU with an AI accelerator can handle, they now can easily migrate to the deeper performance capabilities of Intel Gaudi 3 accelerator.

Explore the new possibilities of 'AI Everywhere' in the ATC

In addition to those innovations, later this year Intel will extend AI to desktops and notebooks at the edge with the next generation of Intel® Core™ Ultra processors, featuring built-in AI acceleration, immersive graphics and increased efficiency for extended battery life.

WWT and Intel are working closely together to expand the AI ecosystem for our customers. It is this longstanding collaboration that earned us the honor of receiving the Intel Partner of the Year award at the 2024 Intel Vision event. This recognition is a testament to our mutual alignment going forward as today's AI advancements reshape our world in ways scarcely imagined. Together, we are harnessing AI to drive positive, powerful outcomes that place a premium on security, safety and social responsibility.

'AI Everywhere' is arriving right now, and you can witness its enabling technologies here in the ATC: contact us to schedule a visit or capabilities presentation. We'll help you explore and understand the many ways that our 'AI Everywhere' vision is destined to transform every aspect of our world – now and in the future.