Intel's new Nervana platform...

I would look at the intel business model to decide how much they are going after the market. Are they seriously investing to both software and hardware ecosystem or just throwing some hardware to it and hoping it sticks somehow?

Intel seems to try and half ass a lot of things. They did that with mobile(phone/tablet) and it looks like they are now done with wearables:

According to sources close to the company, Intel is about to step back from wearables in a big way.
https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/18/intel-layoffs/

Who knows if intel is really serious about ai or not. It's a lucrative but not very easy market to enter.

It's very difficult to discuss intel solution as they don't really give tangibles to be discussed. Near future Nvidia products are not well understood either. What is nvlink2 and volta exactly? What is capability of the oak ridge facility being deployed on 2017. Nvidia's xavier is known but not known so it's difficult to really dissect and discuss that chips capabilities and how it compares to competition.

I believe amd is also going to try to play in this space but who knows how it goes.
 
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They say they intend to use it for training. The question, then, is how flexible will it be? If it's too fixed function, it risks being left behind since the most effective ways of training a network is still very much an area of active research, as well as varients in the structure of the network themselves.

Deep learning networks are currently very "rudimentry" - input -> output processes, but it seems likely that the next step will be some sort of stateful network - that is, networks with memory. We have some very basic types right now, but getting them to full effectiveness may require some tweaking to the training algorithms, and if Nervana isn't flexible enough to do this, it will be useless in that field.
 
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