While artificial intelligence is one of the hottest enterprise technology topics today, most companies are still figuring out how to harness AI as a competitive differentiator and driver for crucial business goals.

Intel Corp. has collaborated with Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. to deliver AI-focused offerings that combine powerful compute and intelligent software.

“Intel and HPE, we’ve been working 30 years together,” said Greg Ernst (pictured), corporate vice president of sales and marketing and general manager of Americas sales at Intel. “They’re one of our absolute leading customers, partners, go-to-market … we rely on them heavily to really take our great semiconductor products and put systems solutions around them to make the technology accessible — whether it’s government agencies, cloud companies, telcos or enterprises. It’s partners like HPE that Intel really needs that extract the value of that compute power and bring it.”

Ernst spoke with theCUBE industry analysts Dave Vellante and Lisa Martin at HPE Discover, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the Intel approach to enterprise AI challenges. (* Disclosure below.)

Unpacking Intel’s AI strategy

Intel’s efforts in AI have existed for years. But things began to ramp up during the COVID pandemic, as the world looked to communicative audio-visual tools to bridge the distance barrier, according to Ernst.

“Intel’s got a big play around video and image AI,” he said. “We have a whole software suite of tools that we call OpenVINO, open-source base. It allows companies to train their video use cases. It’s great for edge, retail, manufacturing, hospitality — they have it deployed.”

On the hardware side of things, which is where Intel excels, its new GPU Max Series packs in the company’s highest-ever transistor count (100 billion) and can support up to 128GB of high bandwidth memory. Built with intrinsic matrix mathematics capabilities, the GPUs are especially suited to handling demanding AI use cases, according to Ernst.

“Argonne National Labs actually deployed an exascale cluster with us, funded in partnership with the Department of Energy, that uses six GPUs per cluster,” he explained. “We’ve actually onboarded accelerators built into just our high-volume Xeons. Customers are seeing 10x improvement versus the previous gen on PyTorch, TensorFlow [and] some of these models.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of HPE Discover:

(* Disclosure: Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. and Intel Corp. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither HPE and Intel nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE