Intel

Intel IT’s data center strategy is to apply breakthrough technologies, solutions, and processes to accelerate Intel’s business. We also run Intel data center services like a factory, e?ecting change in a disciplined manner. Our approach enables us to optimally meet Intel’s business requirements while providing our internal customers with e?ective data center infrastructure capabilities and innovative business services.

Building on previous investments and techniques, our data center strategy has generated savings exceeding USD 9.6 billion from 2010 to 2023. We are continually improvising our data center strategy to further our data center transformation. We will accomplish this by using disruptive server, storage, network, infrastructure software, and data center facility technologies. These can lead to unprecedented quality-of-service levels and a reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO) for business applications. And they will enable us to continue to improve IT operational efficiency and be environmentally responsible.

Transformational elements of our data center strategy include the following:

Some of our most notable achievements include:

Our data center transformation strategy is critical for Intel IT to stay competitive. We are committed to providing a foundation for continuous innovation that will improve the quality, velocity, and efficiency of Intel IT’s business services.

Intel Factory Pathfinder delivers advanced simulation/scheduling capabilities for manufacturing.

How efficiently is your factory operating? Are you able to provide accurate delivery dates to customers and consistently meet those dates? Are you maximizing the utilization of your equipment and raw materials to keep your factory running optimally and cost effectively?

If not, Intel Factory Pathfinder was developed just for you. Factory Pathfinder can help you quickly identify and eliminate bottlenecks and constraints in your factory and equipment before they happen.

With the surge in the growth and adoption of Generative AI (GenAI) tools, Intel has seen hundreds of employees and teams begin using and developing tools based on commercial large language models (LLMs).

Recognizing the immense potential of these tools to enhance efficiency and innovation—as well as concerns around AI data security, ethical use, and accuracy of responses—Intel IT formed a working group to understand common usage patterns, coordinate knowledge sharing across teams, and establish guidelines for safe usage.

This proactive approach led to the development of a new platform, aimed at democratizing Intel’s use of GenAI by empowering employees at all levels of technical skill to use these tools to improve their day-to-day productivity and unlock new efficiencies in Intel’s business processes.

Our initiative is designed to facilitate the use of GenAI without the need to repeatedly rebuild common components, thereby reducing security risks and speeding time to value. The rapid deployment of this platform has already demonstrated tangible value. Although the platform is currently in pilot, early users have reported notable increases in productivity. We estimate that approximately 75% of Intel employees will eventually use the GenAI platform.”

Intel is evolving quickly, and Intel IT is a key driver in that evolution. As the architects of Intel’s IT landscape, we are the strategic, trusted technology partner for Intel’s business. Our focus is on innovation, AI, and optimization as well as the IT experience of our workforce, our end users, and Intel’s customers.

The 21st edition of the IT Annual Performance Report highlights the transformative progress we made in 2023 and how IT is providing the essential technology and resources that will spearhead Intel’s transformation and continued growth in 2024.

Please explore the report for more on our accomplishments and plans ahead.

Intel IT migrated enterprise data analytics to the cloud, enabling faster turnaround of business requests and increased operational efficiency.

Digital twins are revolutionizing how we model, simulate, and optimize everything—from product designs to real-world systems and processes across virtually every industry.

For our manufacturing process, we developed Intel Operations Recon to model, simulate, and optimize our manufacturing operations, improve yields accelerate problem resolution and training, increase uptime, and more. And now we’re making Intel Operations Recon available to all kinds of industries that can benefit from it. And the software can be customized to model, simulate,

Intel Operations Recon enables you to see your world in three modes:

Intel Operations Recon benefits also extend beyond efficiency. You can also use it to improve safety and customer satisfaction, reduce costs and risks, contribute to your sustainability initiatives, and more.

In this video, we provide an example of how Intel Operations Recon could be applied to the airline industry.

If are you ready to unlock unprecedented levels of visibility, insights, and efficiency in your operations quickly and easily with Intel Recon, reach out to [email protected] to get started.

Intel IT is using computer vision and AI for inline inspection in Intel’s assembly and test factories.

Keeping Intel’s global network of factories running at top efficiency is one of Intel IT’s primary roles. Over the last decade, we have introduced numerous automated, artificial intelligence (AI)-based solutions that significantly reduce waste and improve product quality. Recently, we added a new capability using computer vision (CV) and machine learning that enables us to perform inline inspection during assembly and test processes. Inline inspection can catch defects and tool issues much earlier than offline inspection. Additionally, our solution, called Intelligent Wafer Vision Inspection (IWVI), can easily detect micrometer-sized defects that are hard to see even with a microscope, as well as defects that are impossible to detect after the process is complete.

High-resolution cameras take multiple images per second while a grinding tool thins the wafer, and a protective polyester film is installed. The images are analyzed by a machine-learning model at the edge. If defects are detected, the solution can sound an alarm or even stop the tool.

The solution, which includes Intel® Core™ i9 processors, Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors and Intel ARC A770 discrete GPUs, is being deployed to all Intel assembly and test factories.

The IWVI solution has been identified as a critical solution to help ensure the quality and reliability of new generations of products in Intel’s factories of the future. Its standardized design results in fast deployment and easy extendibility to new use cases. The PoC demonstrated that the solution could accurately identify many types of defects in the wafer-thinning process, including indentations, scratches of various sizes, grinding marks, stains, cracks, bubbles, wafer shift and mount shift.

The PoC demonstrated that up to 50% of wafer-thinning issues can be detected earlier with inline inspection compared to offline inspection. When the IWVI alarm sounds, the wafer can be reworked, which avoids whole-wafer delamination during downstream processes. More importantly, the solution goes beyond what was possible with offline metrology:

Using the IWVI solution, we achieve several business benefits:

We anticipate that the solution will eventually extend to additional processes, and we are excited to share our success with other manufacturers, who may be able to adapt the solution to additional use cases.

Learn the latest in Intel IT’s approach to fault detection for factory equipment.

For many years, Intel IT has utilized a standard infrastructure with Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) sensors and Intel IoT Gateways for various applications on the factory floor. Simultaneously, we have employed a separate and expensive vendor-based system for fault detection and classification (FDC) on factory equipment. This system has contributed to reduced factory downtime and enhanced predictive maintenance on certain subfab equipment, such as pumps, gas abatement systems, chillers, and more.

To lower costs, increase quality and accelerate necessary changes in the factory, we explored displacing the vendor’s system with our standardized IoT infrastructure. We also added new, innovative command-and-control capabilities. As we connected tools to our IIoT infrastructure, our system proved to be 10x less expensive than the vendor’s solution. It is also more flexible and can communicate with open standards and proprietary protocols.

The “brains” of the system are a collection of Python drivers—written by software developers in any Intel group who wants to contribute to the code—that control both the data collection and the command-and-control capabilities. This open-source solution has zero license costs and democratizes the solution; if another machine needs closed-loop control, an engineer can simply add a new driver to the library. The solution consists of the data collection plane and the control plane:

Having demonstrated lower costs and improved product quality, we are now scaling our IIoT-based FDC solution to over a thousand subfab tools. We estimate the solution’s value as high as USD 16 million for just a single factory that contains hundreds of subfab entities that support the wafer-etching process.

Our low-cost IIoT manufacturing use cases create savings & reduce downtime. We hope they inspire other manufacturers to adopt a similar approach.

Increasing Electronic Design Automation (EDA) performance and throughput is critical to Intel’s silicon Design engineers.

Silicon chip Design engineers at Intel face ongoing challenges: integrating more features into ever-shrinking silicon chips, bringing products to market faster and keeping Design engineering and manufacturing costs low. Design engineers run more than 273 million compute-intensive batch jobs every week. Each job takes from a few seconds to several days to complete.

As design complexity increases, so do the requirements for compute capacity, so refreshing servers and workstations with higher-performing systems is cost-effective and offers a competitive advantage by enabling faster chip design. Refreshing older servers also enables us to realize data center cost savings. By taking advantage of the performance and power-efficiency improvements in new server generations, we can increase computing capacity within the same data center footprint, helping to avoid expensive data center construction and reduce operational costs due to reduced power consumption.

To meet these engineers’ computing capacity requirements, Intel IT conducts ongoing throughput performance tests using real-world Intel silicon Design workloads. These tests measure EDA workload throughput and help us analyze the performance improvements—and in turn, business benefits offered by newer generations of Intel® processors.

We recently tested two-socket servers based on the Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8400 and Gold 6400 processor Series, operating single- and multi-threaded EDA applications running Intel silicon Design workloads for more than 113 hours (about 4 and a half days). Select results include the following:

Based on our performance assessment and our refresh cycle, we are deploying servers based on the 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processor family in our data centers. By doing so, we have significantly increased EDA throughput performance to improve the overall EDA design cycles and optimize time to market of Intel® chips.