IBM and NeuReality team up to build the next generation of AI inference platforms

November 2, 2021 -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) and NeuReality, an Israeli AI systems and semiconductor company, have signed an agreement to develop the next generation of high-performance AI inference platforms that will deliver disruptive cost and power consumption improvements for deep learning use cases. IBM and NeuReality will enable critical sectors such as finance, insurance, healthcare, manufacturing, and smart cities to deploy computer vision, Natural Language Processing, recommendation systems, and other AI use cases. The collaboration is also aimed at accelerating deployments in today’s ever-growing AI use cases which are already deployed in public and private cloud datacenters

The agreement involves NR1, NeuReality’s first Server-on-a-Chip ASIC implementation of their revolutionary AI-centric architecture. NR1 is based on NeuReality’s first generation FPGA-based NR1-P prototype platform that was introduced earlier this year. The NR1 will be a new type of integrated circuit device with native AI-over-Fabric networking, full AI pipeline offload and hardware-based AI hypervisor capabilities. These capabilities remove the system bottlenecks of today’s solutions and provide disruptive cost and power consumption benefits for inference systems and services. The NR1-P platform will support software integration and system level validation prior to the availability of the NR1 production platform next year.

This partnership also marks NeuReality as the first start-up semiconductor product member of the IBM Research AI Hardware Center and licensee of the Center’s low-precision high performance Digital AI Cores. As part of the agreement, IBM becomes a design partner of NeuReality and will work on the product requirements for the NR1 chip, system, and SDK, that will be implemented in the next revision of the architecture. Together the two companies will evaluate NeuReality’s products for use in IBM’s Hybrid Cloud, including AI use cases, system flows, virtualization, networking, security and more.

The agreement with IBM marks the continued momentum for NeuReality. In February this year, the company emerged from stealth announcing its first-of-a-kind AI-centric architecture and laying out its roadmap, where NR1-P will be followed by NR1. Shortly after, in September, NeuReality announced that it is collaborating with Xilinx to deliver their new AI-centric FPGA based NR1-P platforms to market.

Moshe Tanach, CEO and co-founder of NeuReality, stated: "We are excited and deeply satisfied that a world-class multinational innovator like IBM is partnering with us. We believe our collaboration is a vote of confidence for our AI-centric technology and architecture and in its potential to power real life AI use cases with unprecedented deep learning capabilities.” Tanach added: "Having the NR1-P FPGA platform available today allows us to develop IBM’s requirements and test them before the NR1 Server-on-a-Chip’s tapeout. Being able to develop, test and optimize complex datacenter distributed features, such as Kubernetes, networking, and security before production is the only way to deliver high quality to our customers. I am extremely proud of our engineering team who will deliver a new reality to datacenters and near edge solutions. This new reality will allow many new sectors to deploy AI use cases more effciently than ever before."

Dr. Mukesh Khare, Vice President of Hybrid Cloud research at IBM Research, said: “In light of IBM's vision to deliver the most advanced Hybrid Cloud and AI systems and services to our clients, teaming up with NeuReality, which brings a disruptive AI-centric approach to the table, is the type of industry collaboration we are looking for. The partnership with NeuReality is expected to drive a more streamlined and accessible AI infrastructure, which has the potential to enhance people’s lives.”

IBM Hybrid Cloud

IBM Hybrid Cloud integrates public cloud services, private cloud services and on-premises infrastructure and provides orchestration, management, and application portability across all three. This creates a single, unified, and flexible distributed computing environment where an organization can run and scale its traditional or cloud-native workloads on the most appropriate computing model.

IBM Research AI Hardware Center

The IBM Research AI Hardware Center is a global research hub headquartered in Albany, New York. The center is focused on inventing and enabling next-generation chips and systems that deliver the tremendous processing power and unprecedented speed required for AI to realize its full potential.

About IBM

IBM is a leading global hybrid cloud and AI, and business services provider. We help clients in more than 175 countries capitalize on insights from their data, streamline business processes, reduce costs, and gain the competitive edge in their industries. Nearly 3,000 government and corporate entities in critical infrastructure areas such as financial services, telecommunications and healthcare rely on IBM's hybrid cloud platform and Red Hat OpenShift to affect their digital transformations quickly, efficiently, and securely. IBM's breakthrough innovations in AI, quantum computing, industry-specific cloud solutions and business services deliver open and flexible options to our clients. All of this is backed by IBM's legendary commitment to trust, transparency, responsibility, inclusivity, and service. Visit www.ibm.com for more information.

About NeuReality

NeuReality Ltd. is an AI technology innovation company creating purpose-built AI-platforms for ultra-scalability of real-life AI applications. NeuReality positioned itself as a pioneer in the deep learning and AI solutions market.

NeuReality was founded in 2019 and is led by a seasoned management team with extensive experience in data centers architecture, system, and software. The co-founders are CEO Moshe Tanach, VP Operations Tzvika Shmueli and VP VLSI Yossi Kasus. Prior to founding NeuReality, Tanach served in several executive roles as Director of Engineering at Marvell and Intel and AVP R&D at DesignArt-Networks (later acquired by Qualcomm). Tzvika Shmueli served as VP of Backend at Mellanox Technologies and VP of Engineering at Habana Labs. Yossi Kasus served as Senior Director of Engineering at Mellanox and the head of VLSI at EZChip.