One thing that unites businesses across the globe is the need to get more value out of enormous and ever-increasing amounts of data. This is particularly true in the Financial Services Industry which is going through a major digital transformation as organizations gradually move away from legacy infrastructure. The growth of Artificial Intelligence (AI), IoT technology and data analytics, along with the impending roll-out of 5G mean that the amount of data created is set to increase dramatically. The recent Intel® Data-Centric Innovation Summit aimed to address some of the data-related challenges and opportunities facing companies now and in the future.
“I find it astounding that 90 percent of the world’s data was generated in the past two years,” said Navin Shenoy, executive vice president and general manager of the Data Center Group at Intel. “And analysts forecast that by 2025 data will exponentially grow by 10 times and reach 163 zettabytes. But we have a long way to go in harnessing the power of this data. A safe guess is that only about 1 percent of it is utilized, processed, and acted upon. Imagine what could happen if we were able to effectively leverage more of this data at scale.”
“We need to look at data holistically, including how we move data faster, store more of it and process everything from the cloud to the edge.”
Illustrating the scale of the opportunity that data represents, Intel has revised its TAM (Total Available Market) from $160 billion in 2021 to $200 billion in 2022. As a data-driven company, Intel is investing in a number of areas to make the most of this opportunity and enable companies to make use of the massive amount of largely untapped data available. “We need to look at data holistically, including how we move data faster, store more of it and process everything from the cloud to the edge,” said Shenoy.
To enable businesses to move and store data in the most economical way, Intel is transforming the memory and storage hierarchy in the data centre. In the move away from legacy infrastructure, data centre transformation is key. Unveiled earlier this year, Intel® Optane™ DC persistent memory is a fast and affordable new technology that enables a large persistent memory tier between DRAM and SSDs. This effectively eliminates data bottlenecks.
Systems using this new technology can deliver up to eight times the performance on certain analytics queries over DRAM-only systems, according to new metrics revealed at the Data-Centric Innovation Summit.1 While a wider roll-out of Intel® Optane™ DC persistent memory is planned for 2019, several major brands are already on board including Google*, Huawei* and SAP*.
At the recent event, Intel also revealed that demand for the Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor platform, which was launched last year, continues to rise. Intel has shipped more than 2 million chips in 2018’s second quarter, followed by another 1 million units in the first four weeks of the third quarter. And highlighting the growing role of AI, Intel revealed that in 2017, more than $1 billion in revenue came from customers running AI on Intel® Xeon® processors in the data centre.
AI will be essential to FSI businesses in the near future, but it requires architecture that is optimized for real-time data. The upcoming Cascade Lake Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor, which will ship later this year, features Intel® Deep Learning Boost (Intel® DL Boost), an accelerator designed to speed up AI workloads. This will be followed by the Cooper Lake chip in 2019 which will feature similar capabilities. Then in 2020, Intel will launch the next-generation Ice Lake Intel® Xeon® processor, which is based on 10nm technology.
“As a data-centric industry leader, Intel is committed to delivering the innovations that will help FSI businesses prepare for the future. Our data-centric computing strategy will enable the financial sector to tame the data deluge and accelerate valuable business insights,” said Mike Blalock, General Manager for Intel’s FSI division.
“In broad terms, we believe that data centre modernization sets the stage for the shift to digital where data is the foundation and analytics is the differentiation. Businesses must prepare now for the future of Financial Services.”
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