Microsoft has launched Project Brainwave, a new research program that aims to process inputs as soon as it receives them, for ‘real-time’ AI tasks. The project sounds like good news for Intel, as Microsoft is relying on its Stratix 10 FPGA chips to power the system – which Microsoft hopes will help lead to Azure becoming a serious cloud-based AI computing provider. For Intel, Microsoft’s endorsement is rather valuable, especially if other cloud-computing providers pay attention and follow suit. For years, Intel has been able to count on the continued growth of computing requirements as a growth vehicle for its Xeon CPU sales – but the advent of AI-based applications and their bespoke hardware requirements has severely disrupted that long-term…