Shulou(Shulou.com)06/02 Report--

Big Data Digest

Yesterday, Intel issued a statement announcing the acquisition of Israeli AI chip maker Habana Labs for a deal worth $2 billion.

This is another major investment by Intel in artificial intelligence, which previously included Nervana Systems and Movidius. This is also Intel's second acquisition of Israeli chip company Mobileye after the $15.3 billion acquisition of Israeli chip company Mobileye in 2017.

In July, Habana released its Gaudi AI training processor, saying it had four times the processing power of GPUs, and Intel wanted to stand out in the AI chip market after missing 5G baseband chips, when there were rumors that Intel would buy Habana, and now the deal has finally come true.

Intel abandoned 5G baseband chip

Intel's acquisition clearly doesn't want to repeat past mistakes_missed opportunities on 5G chips. In July, 2200 Intel employees and 17000 wireless technology patents went to Apple as Apple announced its acquisition of most of Intel's 5G baseband business.

This means Intel has given up the competition for 5G baseband chips, and Apple has become another giant company to join the 5G baseband chip battlefield after Qualcomm, Huawei, Samsung, MediaTek and Violet.

In fact, the storm of 5G baseband chip has been emerging since the 4G era. When mobile communication transitions from 3G to 4G, Qualcomm, Infineon, Freescale, STMicroelectronics NXP, Broadcom, Marvell and Texas Instruments, which are known as the seven heroes, have left for six consecutive times except Qualcomm and MediaTek, and the biggest reason behind this is_too expensive!

With mobile communication moving from 2G, 3G, 4G to 5G now, the development of chips has become more and more complicated from the perspective of multi-band compatibility or compatibility of multiple communication modes. It costs hundreds of millions of dollars to throw money, and then it costs more money to test with operators of various countries. It can be said that other companies can hardly afford it except giant companies.

After a series of reshuffles, only Huawei, Qualcomm, Samsung, MediaTek and Ziguang Zhanrui are left to launch 5G chips. Intel, which originally had a place in 4G chips, also regrets to leave. The acquisition of Habana officially confirms Intel's future power direction and main battlefield-AI chip.

Strong forces join forces to stir up AI chip battle

More than 40 AI chips competed at the MLPerf Benchmark Alliance AI Reasoning Benchmark in November, including Google (TPUv3), Nvidia (T4, RTX, Xavier), Alibaba's "Light 800," Intel's CLX 9282 and NNPI-1000, and Habana's Goya chip.

MLPerf is a new benchmark tool jointly created by Turing Award winner David Patterson, Google, Baidu, Intel, AMD, Harvard University and Stanford University. It is used to test the execution speed of machine learning software and hardware, which is an authoritative test in the industry.

The final result is that Ali's Hanguang 800 participated in the Resnet50 benchmark test for image classification tasks under the MLPerf benchmark test, and achieved single-chip first in four scenarios: offline mode, service mode, multi-channel mode and single-channel mode.

Habana's Goya came in fourth, behind Google's TPUv3 and NVIDIA's RTX, while Intel's two chips came in sixth and seventh.

It has to be said that at the current AI chip system reasoning level, Ali's Hanguang 800 has reached the world's leading level. Although the old chip manufacturers still have absolute advantages in general chips, Nvidia, Intel and Google have to face the reality of the rise of Chinese-made AI chips on AI chips with rapidly expanding market.

Under such circumstances, the acquisition of Israeli technology companies known for chip design has become the choice of wealthy established companies, and Intel's acquisition of Habana is based on such considerations, trying to further expand its advantages in the future AI chip battle. So far, this approach seems to have paid off and given Intel a competitive edge, which is expected to have a market cap of about $24 billion in this space by 2024.

Intel noted that in 2019 alone, the company expects "AI-driven revenue" to exceed $3.5 billion, up 20 percent from the previous year.

Navin Shenoy, executive vice president of Intel, said at the press conference: "This acquisition enhances Intel's strength in artificial intelligence, from the intelligent edge to the data center, Intel will provide customers with solutions to meet a variety of performance needs."

"More specifically, Habana adds a family of high-performance training processors and standards-based programming environments to our AI data centers to address changing AI job demands. "

Independent operation after acquisition, business retained in Israel

For now, Intel wants Habana to be run as a separate business unit, retaining its existing management team, with its operations still primarily based in Israel.

Habana chairman Avigdor Willenz will also remain as a senior adviser to the business unit and Intel. Habana will continue to be headquartered in Israel, where Intel also has significant business and long-term investments and was one of Habana's investors prior to the transaction.

Following Intel's acquisition of Habana, Willenz will serve as a senior advisor to the business unit and Intel Corporation.

Havana will report to Intel's Data Platforms Group, which owns Intel's AI technology information. This approach to business gives Habana access to Intel's AI capabilities, including important resources built over the past three years-including deep expertise in AI software, algorithms and research-that will help Habana scale.

Habana currently has two main products, Gaudi, a Gaudi-based large-node training system that is expected to increase throughput by four times compared to systems built with the same amount of GPUs. Gaudi is designed to enable efficient and flexible system expansion and scaling.

In addition, the Goya AI inference processor currently on sale also demonstrates excellent inference performance, including throughput and real-time latency.

"For Intel's investment in Habana, we feel fortunate to have deep knowledge of Intel and to work with it. Habana CEO David Dahan said,"Intel has created a world-class AI team and capabilities. Partnering with Intel will accelerate and scale our business. We will work together to deliver more AI innovations to our customers at a faster pace. "

Related reports:

https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/16/intel-buys-ai-chipmaker-habana-for-2-billion/

https://newsroom.intel.com/news-releases/intel-ai-acquisition/#gs.mourb2

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