Interesting that this is Intel's second acquisition of an AI chipmaker. They had acquired Nervana for $400M in 2016 - but now seem to be abandoning it in favor of Habana's chips. They would need to redo the Nervana software stack to work with Habana. As per the article, one of the reasons is:
"Nervana’s Neural Network Processor (NNP-T) uses a proprietary interconnect for scaling, while Habana’s Gaudi can scale to thousands of nodes over standard 100Gb Ethernet."
"Nervana’s Neural Network Processor (NNP-T) uses a proprietary interconnect for scaling, while Habana’s Gaudi can scale to thousands of nodes over standard 100Gb Ethernet."