Intel CTO Lavender Spotlights Software Strategy With Open-Source, AI Push

Intel introduced new services and tools Wednesday at Intel Innovation 2022 to help developers reduce time-to-market and increase performance and security.

Intel CTO Greg Lavender Wednesday outlined some of the vendor’s next steps in its software strategy as it focuses on open-source standards, AI reference kits and its ‘Project Amber’ cloud verification service.

Lavender spotlighted oneAPI, a cross-industry, open-source, standards-based programming model that allows developers to choose the best architecture for the specific problem they are trying to solve.

The initiative is intended to address the evolving needs of developers, software vendors, national labs and researchers.

Going forward, Intel subsidiary Codeplay will now assume responsibility for the oneAPI development community, Intel said.

[Related: Intel Launches 13th-Gen Core Processors, Unison Software]

Intel said it plans to continue building developer tools based on oneAPI, including its oneAPI 2023 toolkits scheduled to ship in December with support for Intel’s latest CPU, GPU and FPGA architectures.

“We are committed members of the developer community, and our breadth and depth of hardware and software assets facilitate the scaling of opportunities for all through co-innovation and collaboration,” Lavender said.

Intel also released three new AI reference kits for developers targeting the health care market, including document automation, disease prediction and medical imaging diagnostics. The new AI reference kits are available now on GitHub.

Lavender also provided an update on Project Amber, the code name for the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company’s cloud security subscription service for confidential computing launched four months ago. Leidos, a federal government technology contractor and No. 11 on the 2022 CRN Solution Provider 500, is among the first to pilot the technology. It is building a proof-of-concept with Project Amber to protect veterans’ health information for future use in mobile clinics.

Lavender said Project Amber will attest to the authenticity of the CPU and the CPU ID to make sure that firmware has not been tampered with.

“We digitally sign it, we encrypt it,” he said.

Lavender also detailed progress toward post-quantum cryptography, a part of Intel’s three-phased approach to address threats posed by quantum computers.

Recent developments toward standardization and raising the urgency of opportunities and risks “are major steps forward for our industry as it prepares to be Y2Q-ready, or quantum-resistant, by 2030,” Lavender said.

“Many believe Y2Q will have a bigger impact than the ‘millennium bug’ in the year 2000,” he said.