Conservative Estimates? Intel's Ai Chip Revenue Was $1 Billion Last Year, And It Is Expected To Rise By 10 Times In 5 Years.

ABSTRACT: Nvidia, the leading graphics chip maker in the competition for AI chips, once said that Intel had only 20% of the global market for its AI chips, but Intel is now investing a lot of resources to catch up. Some analysts even believe that from Intel's disclosure of AI revenue, we can see that Intel is confident of capturing the AI chip market.

Intel disclosed for the first time yesterday (Aug. 8) that it sold $1 billion of artificial intelligence (AI) chips in 2017. At the same time, Intel expects the sector's turnover to grow by ten times to $10 billion in 2022.

Undoubtedly, the AI wave is sweeping the world, and has become the first market for domestic and foreign manufacturers. Artificial Intelligence (AI) chips will enter a rapid development phase in the next five years, according to the report of American market research company ReportLinker. It is estimated that by 2023, the market will reach US $10 billion 800 million and the compound annual growth rate will reach 53.6%.

Nvidia, the big graphics chip maker, is currently leading the race for AI chips, and Intel has said it has only 20% of the global market for AI chips, but Intel is investing a lot of resources to catch up. Some analysts even believe that from Intel's disclosure of AI revenue, we can see that Intel is confident of capturing the AI chip market.

Intel invested heavily in the layout of AI

As the absolute hegemony of the PC era, Intel has missed the mobile Internet era, and in the coming AI era, the company has positively layout, and has invested huge sums of money in successive acquisitions of Altera, Mobileye, Movidius, Nervana, Saffron and other companies.

It is understood that Intel's cloud AI chip project named "Intel Nervana Neural Network Processors" (NNP), the main machine learning training. Intel unveiled its latest cloud-based AI chip, Nervana NNP-L1000, code-named Spring Crest, at the first AIDC 2018 conference, a 3-4-fold increase in performance from the previous generation of "Lake Crest" and is expected to open to users in the second half of 2019. Intel has yet to publish any information about the Spring Crest process node.

It's worth mentioning that the last generation of Lake Crest used Intel's own 14nm process. In addition, Carey Kloss, vice president of hardware at Intel AI, said the new Spring Crest chip was targeted at Google's recently released TPU 3.0, while the previous generation of Lake Crest chips were targeted at Google's TPU 2.0.

AI revenue is likely to be more than $1 billion last year

With PC sales stagnating, Intel is increasingly relying on its data center business, which sells chips to data centers that support mobile and network applications. These applications rely on AI chip to realize the functions of photo and speech recognition.

Navin Shenoy, director of Intel's data center, told a recent meeting in Santa Clara, California, that the company had been able to improve its central processing unit over the past few years, making it more than 200 times more capable of handling AI training. This brings Intel Xeon processors to $1 billion in sales in 2017, compared with $62.8 billion in revenue over the same period.

Meanwhile, Navin Shenoy says the stepped-up in processor performance has had a significant business impact on Intel.
Naveen Rao, director of Intel's AI product division, said Intel estimated that it sold $1 billion worth of AI processors last year, based on customers telling Intel they were looking to buy AI chips and calculations of how much such work would be required from computing customers'data centers.

Naveen Rao even said in an interview that it might be more than $1 billion, which could be much higher.

Why is the figure of $1 billion so important? Intel's share price fell at one point after last month's earnings report fell short of Wall Street's expectations for its data center business. Intel also said the launch of its latest generation of chips would be delayed to 2020, prompting analysts to worry that its data center market share would be replaced by AMD. (proofreading / spring and summer)