Intel has been hyperactive in AI; both at the hardware level with its dedicated Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), and on the software front, applying associative learning to support decisions in quality control and maintenance. The biggest splash was made by the announcement of its close collaboration with Microsoft over application of its FPGAs in the latter’s Project Brainwave, which has just been released. Intel and Microsoft were once almost joined at the hip in the early days of personal computing in the 1980s, and recently their collaboration has intensified again around AI, with Project Brainwave woven around FPGAs to accelerate AI applications. At this stage, many ‘real-time’ AI applications will require dedicated hardware to meet performance expectations given the…