Microsoft has been steadily enhancing Bing’s capabilities and incorporating “intelligent answers” into its search engine’s results. Today, Microsoft unveiled some feature updates to Bing’s intelligent search, including more answers that include relevant information from across multiple sources, hover-over definitions for uncommon words, multiple answers for how-to questions, and additional opportunities to search within an image. To accelerate Bing’s intelligent search capabilities beyond what common servers could do, Microsoft developed its Project Brainwave device, powered by Intel Arria and Stratix Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) and the results are quite impressive. The Intel FPGAs used on Project Brainwave make real-time AI possible by providing customizable hardware acceleration to complement the Intel Xeon CPUs powering the servers, for speeding up computationally-heavy parts of the deep neural networks that aren’t well suited to x86 CPU. Intel’s FPGAs have reportedly enabled Microsoft to decrease the latency of its models by more than 10x, while simultaneously increasing model size by 10x as well.

Source: Forbes March 27, 2018 01:18 UTC