Many of the CEOs I talk to are hungry to grow at scale. This calls for increased revenue without substantial costs from pricey acquisitions or infrastructure investment. These same leaders, however, face unprecedented challenges: the race to integrate artificial intelligence (AI), data security and protection, and a looming recession (predicted to be anywhere from mild to catastrophic, depending upon your news source).
The trio is either a perfect storm or, from my perspective, a tremendous opportunity to amp up your performance. Seen through the lens of the following 3Rs – risk, ROI and relevancy – perhaps the best place to start is by looking at what you already have.
Risk
Risk takes on several faces for CEOs in a post-pandemic world defined by a worker shortage, supply chain disruption and economic uncertainty.
As AI spending continues to increase, the risk factor goes up. There’s little question that AI is a business imperative – yet no more than 20% of AI models get deployed. Where’s the disconnect? According to an article from MIT Sloan School of Management, most data scientists deliver results using smaller and more controlled data sets. AI tends to fall apart, however, when put to task for the larger organization (aka the real world).
Then there’s the avalanche of data that CEOs and their teams are trying to figure out how to optimize – and protect. With edge-to-cloud infrastructure, companies continue to generate, store and analyze data at scale. Here, the risk landscape is easy to see as cyber threats gain momentum.
AI and data have something in common: they demand more processing power.
A year ago, I co-hosted Intel Innovation, where Intel predicted breaking the exascale barrier to reach zettascale (a 1000x increase) by 2027-ish. This will be the next supercomputing standard. Yet, all that data is going to require more data security and protection.
I am really excited about the advanced security technologies to help protect data using 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors. They are akin to equipping your house with inconspicuous security cameras and alarm systems, as opposed to installing iron gates without any other security measure.
The 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor family includes a zero-trust security strategy while allowing for collaboration and sharing of insights, even with sensitive or regulated data. In my blog, “Zero Trust Security, Authorship and Our Creative Future,” I talk about how zero trust security assumes your operation has been breached. There’s a reason why this is important. In an article written by Accenture’s security expert, Gabe Albert, “corporate network boundaries are disappearing”, which inspires a contextual-based approach to security. Security needs to be everywhere at every moment.
Intel addresses zero trust security by using Intel Software Guard Extensions (Intel SGX), the most researched, updated and deployed confidential computing technology in data centers on the market today, with the smallest trust boundary of any confidential computing technology in the data center world.
ROI
With the need for increased processing power, the question is: do you throw more CPUs at the problem, or do you get your house in order and make the CPUs you have perform more efficiently?
This is one reason the 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors (i.e. 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, Intel® Xeon® CPU Max Series, and Intel Data Center GPU Max Series for high performance computing (HPC) help lower cost as key workloads such as AI, analytics, networking, storage and high performance computing rise. Intel’s strategy is to align CPU cores with built-in accelerators optimized for specific workloads, delivering superior performance for optimal total cost of ownership. This is a more efficient alternative to the growing CPU core count. Better CPU utilization saves money, a welcome solution to the fact that cores have doubled since SKX, while yet AI performance has increased more than>10x with AMX. A flood of big data is streaming into companies – data that once could only be handled by a supercomputer. According to Statista, data creation will grow to more than 180 zettabytes by 2025. Intel’s pledge to “do more with what you have” equips companies with greater computational power.
ROI is not confined to the digital world; it extends to the physical world as well. The sustainability of our earth and natural resources is at stake with an aggressive plea from the United Nations and its challenge that the world meets 17 sustainable development goals by 2030. The 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors pack more transistors in less space, harkening back to Moore’s Law (Intel cofounder Gordon Moore) which, in 1965, predicted that the number of transistors would double at a rapid cadence. More efficiency per watt means more efficient CPU utilization and lower electricity consumption.
Also, built-in accelerators for encryption help free up CPU cores while improving performance, which is a sustainability gain. In fact, 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors are Intel’s most sustainable data center processors to date, providing solutions to manage power and performance.
Relevancy
Intel has, from the start, been an integrated device manufacturer (IDM), meaning they have long been at the forefront of designing and manufacturing chips. According to Fast Company, Intel is investing $20 billion in two new semiconductor fabrication centers (called fabs) in Chandler, AZ and an additional $20 billion in a new fab in Albany, OH. These are the largest private-sector investments in both states.
Intel is positioned to lead the data center space as it accelerates performance across the fastest-growing workloads with the 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® processor families, it continues to make hefty investments in fabs, its history of pioneering prowess, and, lastly, its CEO Patrick Gelsinger, who is the architect of the original 80486 processor, led 14 microprocessor programs and played key roles in the Intel Core™ and Intel® Xeon® processor families.
Risk, ROI and relevancy are the 3Rs for CEOs to ponder. A faster, more agile world beckons. And, like the laptops we carry around or the mobile phones we pocket, when it comes to Intel® Xeon® processors, you might even one day ask how we ever lived without them.
From time to time, Intel invites industry thought leaders to share their opinions and insights on current technology trends. The opinions in this post are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Intel. #Intelpartner