Yes, Nvidia dominates in deep learning and AI, but the risk of disruption by Intel is much greater than a lot of non-technical people realize. Intel has to do only two things to start taking market share away from Nvidia in DL/AI quickly:
2. Contribute open-source code to the main branches of the most popular DL/AI frameworks (Tensorflow, Theano, Torch) so these frameworks support the new chip functionality "out of the box," without requiring any additional tweaking. This is not yet happening, but I'm hoping it will soon.
Many DL/AI developers would be content with "good enough" performance out-of-the-box from CPUs if it means not having to pay extra for Nvidia cards or deal with Nvidia's proprietary drivers.
It would be great for Nvidia to get real competition in this space.
1. Add "good enough" functionality to its high-end processors. Intel is already working on that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12709220
2. Contribute open-source code to the main branches of the most popular DL/AI frameworks (Tensorflow, Theano, Torch) so these frameworks support the new chip functionality "out of the box," without requiring any additional tweaking. This is not yet happening, but I'm hoping it will soon.
Many DL/AI developers would be content with "good enough" performance out-of-the-box from CPUs if it means not having to pay extra for Nvidia cards or deal with Nvidia's proprietary drivers.
It would be great for Nvidia to get real competition in this space.