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Microsoft Previews Project Brainwave Hardware for 'Real-Time' AI
Last week Microsoft announced the preview of Project Brainwave, "programmable hardware" that sits on Intel's field programmable gate array (FPGA) chips and is designed to help "greatly speed up" artificial intelligence (AI) calculations.
Project Brainwave helps with AI calculation speed by letting companies do their AI calculations in real time instead of splitting them into smaller batches and reducing latency reduction, the company said.
According to Microsoft, when combined with its Azure Machine Learning offering, it will offer enterprises "real-time AI calculations at competitive cost and with the industry's lowest latency, or lag time."
"I think this is a first step in making the FPGAs more of a general-purpose platform for customers," Mark Russinovich, chief technical officer for Microsoft's Azure cloud computing platform, said of the Project Brainwave preview at Build 2018.
Currently, the Project Brainwave preview supports TensorFlow, and the company is working on having it support the Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit.
More information on Project Brainwave can be found here.
About the Author
Becky Nagel is the vice president of Web & Digital Strategy for 1105's Converge360 Group, where she oversees the front-end Web team and deals with all aspects of digital projects at the company, including launching and running the group's popular virtual summit and Coffee talk series . She an experienced tech journalist (20 years), and before her current position, was the editorial director of the group's sites. A few years ago she gave a talk at a leading technical publishers conference about how changes in Web browser technology would impact online advertising for publishers. Follow her on twitter @beckynagel.