Nervana Systems

The company's (now discontinued) open source deep learning framework is called neon.[6] Neon – which the company says outperforms rival frameworks such as Caffe, Theano, Torch, and TensorFlow[6] – achieves its performance advantage through assembler-level optimization, multi-GPU support, and use of an algorithm called Winograd for computing convolutions, which are common mathematical operations in the deep learning process.[7]

Nervana Cloud,[8] announced in February 2016, is based on Neon, and runs on Nvidia Titan X GPUs today, but Nervana is developing a custom application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) called the Nervana Engine that is optimized for deep learning and that Nervana says will perform 10x better than Nvidia Maxwell architecture GPUs.[9] The Nervana Engine will achieve greater compute density by implementing only those design elements that are necessary to support deep learning algorithms and ignoring legacy elements specific to graphics processing.[10]

Nervana was founded in 2014 by CEO Naveen Rao, CTO Amir Khosrowshahi (Dara Khosrowshahi's cousin[11]), and VP Algorithms Arjun Bansal.[12] Nervana has raised $28 million in funding.[2] In June 2015, Nervana raised $20.5 million in series A funding led by Data Collective with participation from Allen & Company, AME Cloud Ventures, Playground Global, the CME Group, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Fuel Capital, Lux Capital, and Omidyar Network.[13] It was estimated to have only 48 employees when it was acquired by Intel in 2016.[4] In January 2020, Intel shut down the development of Nervana in favor of its acquisition of Habana Labs.[14]