The Israeli Newreality is the first chip start-up company in the world to be chosen to join IBM's AI Hardware Center * Dr. Mukesh Kahara, IBM: "The partnership with Neoreality, which developed the unique AI-centric approach, is the type of collaboration we are looking for"
The AI startup New reality (NeuReality) of Caesarea and IBM announced the signing of an agreement to develop the next generation of high-performance artificial intelligence platforms for inference that will offer significant improvements in costs and power consumption in deep learning applications. The two companies will enable critical market sectors such as finance, insurance, healthcare, manufacturing and smart cities to implement AI applications such as computer vision, natural language processing, recommendation systems and more.
With the signing of the agreement, Newreality became the first chip startup in the world to join the IBM Research AI Hardware Center as a member. As part of the agreement, IBM will become a design partner of Newreality and will participate in defining the product requirements of the NR1 component as well as defining the system and software packages that will be implemented in the next update of the architecture. As part of the agreement, the two companies will perform integration tests and estimates regarding the use of Neurality products in IBM's hybrid cloud, including common use scenarios of artificial intelligence, optimizations of system processes in the data centers, virtualization, networks, security, and more.
The agreement with IBM is another technological and business step for Newreality, which was established in 2019 and was first revealed in February of this year when it announced the first AI-centric inference platform of its kind in the world, redefining the maximum efficiency achievable from AI computing systems. Shortly after, in September, the company announced a business partnership with Xilinx that aims to bring the FPGA-based NR1-P AI-centric platforms to the market and now we are witnessing another important agreement.
The collaboration is based on Neurality's first server-on-a-chip ASIC, model NR1, which is the first realization of the company's innovative AI-centric architecture. NR1 is based on the NR1-P prototype, which Neuraliti introduced earlier this year. NR1 will be a new type of chip with built-in AI-over-Fabric (AIoF) networking capabilities, the ability to execute full artificial intelligence processing processes (AI-pipeline), and hardware-based AI hypervisor capabilities that reduce processes currently performed in software on generic processors (CPU) . These capabilities make it possible to remove systemic bottlenecks that exist in current solutions and bring about a sharp improvement in costs and power consumption in AI systems and services during the application phase in various applications for a variety of sectors. The existing NR1-P platform will allow NewReality and IBM to test how NR1 will integrate into the cloud environment to attack NR1 at the system level, even before going into production of the NR1 component next year.
Moshe Tanach, CEO and co-founder of NeuReality, said: "We are very pleased that an innovative international company like IBM is cooperating with us. The collaboration is a vote of confidence in our technology, our AI-centric architecture, and its potential to run real-life AI processes with unprecedented deep learning capabilities. The availability of the NR1-P FPGA platform now allows us to develop IBM's requirements before the market release of the server on the NR1 chip."
Tanach added: "The only way to provide high value to our customers is to develop, test and optimize distributed and complex data center features such as Kubernetes, networking, security and more, before NR1 goes into production. I am very proud of our engineering team that will bring a new reality to data centers and edge solutions. This new reality will allow new sectors to run AI applications with greater efficiency than ever before."
Dr. Mukesh Kahara, vice president of hybrid cloud research in IBM's research division, stated: "IBM's vision is to provide the most advanced AI hybrid cloud systems and services. The partnership with Neoreality, which developed the innovative AI-centric architecture, is the type of collaboration we are looking for in the industry. The collaboration is expected to yield a more efficient and accessible AI infrastructure, which has the potential to enrich all of our lives in all areas."
New Reality was founded in 2019 by Moshe Tanach, who serves as CEO, Tzvika Shmueli, Vice President of Operations, and Yossi Kasos who serves as Vice President of Chip Development. Before establishing Newreality, Moshe Tanach held senior positions as director of engineering at Marvel and Intel and vice president of R&D at Designart Networks (later acquired by Qualcomm). Zvika Shmueli served as Vice President of Backend at Mellanox and as Vice President of Engineering at Habana Labs. Yossi Kasos served as senior director of engineering at Mellanox and as head of chip development at IZchip. Newreality, which was first revealed in February of this year, currently employs about 30 female and male employees in the company's development centers in Caesarea and Tel Aviv. The company intends to double the number of employees in the coming year in order to support the development challenges.
