Intel has been going like an asthmatic ant with a heavy load of shopping lately and after losing the mobile market to Qualcomm it looks as if the the AI market might be lost to the graphics tsars – Nvida and AMD.

Now Intel has announced it has a its first AI chip, the Nervana Neural Network Processor and the beastie  will roll out of factories by year's end.

Originally dubbed Lake Crest, the chip gets its name from Nervana, a company Intel purchased in August 2016, taking on the CEO, Naveen Rao, as Intel's AI guru.

Nervana is designed from the ground up for machine learning and you can't play games on it.  Rao thinks that ditching the GPU heritage made room for optimisations like super-fast data interconnections allowing a bunch of Nervanas to act together like one giant chip.It does away with the caches that hold data the processor might need to work on next. "In neural networks... you know ahead of time where the

It does away with the caches that hold data the processor might need to work on next. "In neural networks... you know ahead of time where the data's coming from, what operation you're going to apply to that data, and where the output is going to," Rao said..