24 PCWorld FEBRUARY 2020NEWS INTEL CONFIRMS TIGER LAKE PROCESSOR
Volumetric video treats video as objects, which can be tracked, manipulated and viewed as users wish.Network Processor for Inference, announced
last year at CES. Shenoy said that the NNPI is
delivering up to 1.6X improvement on natural
language workloads and 3.7X on system level
performance, within a 75W envelope.
Intel also said that an athlete-tracking
technology will be deployed at the 2020
Olympic Games, powered by its 2nd-gen
Xeon Scalable chips—the fastest growing
Xeon part in its history. In sports training, a
similar technology is used to analyze how
athletes use the various parts of their body
during workouts.
Similarly, James Carwana, vice president
and general manager of Intel sports, showed
off the progress with Intel’s volumetric video,
which captures a three-dimensional image ofsports action using cameras trained on the
playing field from all around the stadium. In
2017, the company could capture a
volumetric “frame” that could be manipulated
as an object in 30 seconds. The company
spent two years working on improving the
processing speed, and in 2019, Intel’s Xeon
helped spur a massive increase in
performance to 30 frames per second,
Carwana explained.
“We figured out the speed portion of the
puzzle, and now have to figure the quality
part,” Carwana said. That requires 67GB per
second of data right now, and will need more
in the future. The next goal is six times more
computing power to improve the resolution
even further.