Microsoft and Intel Corp are again collaborating on an effort to advance deep learning capabilities in Microsoft’s search engine using the chip maker’s FPGAs (field programmable gate array).

The Software maker pointed out how it’s Bing search engine is demonstrating real-time AI capabilities running on Intel’s Arria and Stratix FPGAs. The goal of the “intelligent search” effort launched by Microsoft last summer is to “provide answers instead of [links to] web pages,” Reynette Au, Intel’s VP for Marketing said. In today’s data-centric world, users are asking more of their search engines than ever. Advanced Intel technology gives Bing the power of real-time AI to deliver more Intelligent Search to users every day, Au noted.

“Intel FPGAs power the technology that allows Bing to quickly process millions of articles across the web to get you contextual answers,” Au wrote on Intel’s blog. “Using machine learning and reading comprehension, Bing will now rapidly provide intelligent answers that help users find what they’re looking for faster, instead of a list of links for the users to manually check.”

Microsoft claims the chip maker’s FPGAs enable real-time AI via tuned hardware acceleration that complements Intel’s Xeon CPUs for computationally heavy parts of the deep neural networks while retaining the flexibility to evolve with rapidly changing AI models and tune to achieve high throughput and maximum performance to deliver real-time AI.

The two companies have decades-long collaboration to maximiSe the performance and capabilities of data centre infrastructure across a wide range of cases, AU noted. “Intelligent Search is another example of the way our two companies work together, selecting the right tools for the job and rising to the challenges of today’s cloud data centres,” the companies observed. 

Claiming their partnership has yielded another sophisticated and exciting AI deployment, Microsoft said, “This illustrates clearly how the power of Intel FPGAs to rapidly change how data is processed to make searches smarter will have long-term benefits for everything and everyone.”