A chat about AI’s role in networking and the edge with Intel’s Pallavi Mahajan

14.10.2023 - 16:09 / venturebeat.com

The edge of the network isn’t always where you find the most powerful computers. But it is the place where you can find the most ubiquitous technology.

The edge means things like smartphones, desktop PCs, laptops, tablets and other smart gadgets that operate on their own processors. They have internet access and may or may not connect to the cloud.

And so big companies like Intel are figuring out just how much technology we’re going to be able to put at networking’s edge. At the recent Intel Innovation 2023 conference in San Jose, California, I talked with Intel exec Sandra Rivera about this and more. We brought up the question of just how powerful AI will be at the edge and what that tech will do for us.

I also had a chance to talk about the edge with Pallavi Mahajan, the corporate vice president and general manager for NEX (networking and edge) software engineering at Intel. She’s been at the company for 15 months, with a focus on the new vision for networking and the edge. She previously worked at HP Enterprises driving strategy and execution for HPC software, workloads and the customer experience. She also spent 16 years at Juniper Networks.

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Mahajan said one of the things it will do is enable us to have a conversation with our desktop. We can ask it when was the last time I talked with someone, and it will search through our history of work and figure that out and give us an answer almost instantly.

Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

VentureBeat: Thanks for talking with me.

Pallavi Mahajan: It’s actually really good to meet you, Dean. Before I get into the actual stuff, let me quickly step back and introduce myself, Pallavi Mahajan. I’m corporate vice president and GM for networking and software. I think I have been here at Intel for 15 months. It was just at a time when network edge was actually forming as a crew. Traditionally, we’ve had the space catered by many business units. The way the edge is growing and if you look into it, the whole distributed edge, everything outside of the public cloud, right up to your client devices – I’m a iPhone person; I love the iPhone.

If you think about it, there’s a donut that gets formed. Think about the center, the whole is the public cloud. Then whether you’re going all the way up to the telcos or all the way up to your industrial machines, or whether you’re looking into the devices that are their – the point of sale devices in your retail chain. You have that entire spectrum, which is what we call as the donut, is what Intel wants to focus