Kathy Gibson at Lenovo’s MEA Summit, Cape Town – IT needs to learn about where other industries are going and this will help in the development of technology.
Alexei Navolokin, alliances director: Middle East, Turkey and Africa at Intel, points out that businesses as diverse — and unexpected — as coffee shops and agriculture are using technology in ways we couldn’t imagine just a short while ago.
The fourth industrial revolution sees the fusion of physical, digital and biological worlds, he adds. “This has changed how we do things and how we are going to live in the future.”
The technology megatrends enabling these moves include cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics, and network transformation in the form of 5G.
But we are just at the beginning of the revolution, he says. Technologies that will soon become mainstream and start to change our lives include merged reality, wearable technology, distributed ledgers like blockchain, the widespread deployment of 5G connectivity, smart machines, cognitive systems and 3D printing.
These technologies are enabling the blending of transactional and digital business models, Navolokin says.
“What Intel is doing is looking at the new applications and looking at how that will change the technology we need.”
The company’s new Xeon Scalable processors are part of this enablement, he says.
“This generation of processors was developed from scratch. This is something completely advanced. The CPU can go up to 18 cores, wth significant improvement above previous generations.”
The new Xeon Scalable platform offers 1,65-times performance gains, 2-times security improvement, 4-times better virtual machine capacity and a 65% lower total cost of ownership (TCO).
These gains are enabled by the Intel Mesh architecture developed for the Xeon Scalable. This provides a more direct path for data throughput than the earlier ring architecture.
Importantly, the mesh accesses all caches and all cores simultaneously to radically speed up the CPU’s performance.
The Intel AVX-512 also boosts performance by offering a new level of vector performance and doubling the available flops per clock cycle.
But Intel isn’t just innovating in the data centre, there are also big moves afoot for the client business.
The client computing group strategy revolves around high-performance processors, the development of ramp technology platforms and the development of new use cases.
“In addition, we will be launching the new 8th generation processor soon,” Navolokin says.
Intel and Lenovo have a long history of partnering. “We have been working on design and marketing as a joint effort across all the segments,” says Navolokin.
