Talking with Lisa Spelman, VP & GM Xeon Products & Data Center Marketing at Intel

In this blog post, we had the privilege of hosting Lisa Spelman, the corporate vice president and general manager of Intel’s Xeon and Memory Group. Lisa shared some exciting updates on what’s happening inside Intel in response to the global pandemic, particularly COVID-19. She also discussed some of Intel’s latest news from within the data platform group and delved into the topic of accelerating analytics and the journey from core to the cloud and into the edge.

Lisa Spelman’s Background and Inspiration

Lisa Spelman, born and raised in Portland, Oregon, shared how her upbringing and family values inspired her to pursue a career in technology and business. She spoke about her journey at Intel, where she held various roles before becoming the corporate vice president and general manager of the Xeon Memory Group.

Lisa’s Day-to-Day Challenges

Before the pandemic, Lisa spent a significant amount of time on the road, meeting with customers, engaging with communities, and participating in external speaking engagements. However, with the global pandemic, she and her team have had to adjust to working from home and finding ways to maintain a work-life balance.

Intel’s Response to COVID-19

Lisa highlighted Intel’s response to the global pandemic, including financial contributions, community projects, and opening up the portfolio of intellectual property to researchers and students to battle COVID-19. She emphasized the pride that Intel employees take in providing critical infrastructure and the company’s commitment to driving solutions focused on genome sequencing, finding origins, working towards vaccines, and managing the impact of the pandemic.

Intel’s Latest Announcements

Lisa discussed Intel’s third generation of Xeon scalable processors, which are tailored to address demanding analytics and AI workloads. She highlighted the addition of artificial intelligence acceleration and capabilities into the processor products, as well as advancements in storage and memory product lines with the second generation of Optane persistent memory and new SSDs.

Tailoring Processors for Today’s Workloads

Lisa provided insights into how Intel’s third generation Xeon scalable processors have been tailored to meet today’s demanding analytics and AI workloads. She discussed the improvements in artificial intelligence acceleration and the ability to hold more data in a persistent format, leading to new use cases and workloads.

Bringing FPGAs into the AI Realm

Lisa also touched upon Intel’s willingness and growth in embracing and investing in other types of processing power and capability beyond just the CPU. She mentioned the use of FPGAs for artificial intelligence acceleration and the development of next-generation FPGAs focused on natural language processing use cases like fraud detection.

Addressing Edge Computing Needs

Lisa emphasized the importance of addressing the growing demand for compute closer to where data is being generated, particularly at the edge. She highlighted the use cases for edge services and the opportunities for new capabilities and improvements in areas such as traffic flow management, delivery services, and consumer experiences.

Providing Tools for Developers and Data Scientists

Lisa discussed Intel’s approach to providing developers and data scientists with the tools they need to take advantage of Intel hardware, from specific hardware-level programming to unified toolkits and application and API layer support. She emphasized the importance of addressing the diverse needs of developers and customers across different layers of the technology stack.

Easing the Burden on IT Leaders

Lisa shared insights into Intel’s efforts to ease the burden on IT leaders in standing up productive AI and analytics solutions faster without having to write the platforms themselves. She highlighted Intel’s investments in Intel Select Solutions, verified configurations of hardware and software that reduce the time spent in testing and accelerate time to deployment while delivering performance benefits.

The Future of AI and Analytics

In closing, Lisa shared her insights on the future of AI and analytics, predicting continued growth in use cases for AI to make lives better, reduce friction in transactions, and increase capabilities. She also emphasized the importance of data governance and privacy and the evolving focus on predictive and useful AI solutions while requiring less data.

As Intel continues to innovate and adapt to the changing landscape of technology, it remains at the forefront of driving advancements in data-centric solutions and empowering customers to unlock new possibilities in the digital era.

Stay tuned for more updates from Intel’s Xeon and Memory Group as they continue to lead the way in shaping the future of technology.

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