Humans have undergone a total of four industrial revolutions, from steam engine and machinery manufacturing to electrification and assembly lines, to automation and IT revolution, to the current transformation of the Internet of Things. As the industry becomes more intelligent and the value of data becomes more prominent. According to IDC's latest IoT report, global IoT spending is projected to exceed 800 billion U.S. dollars in 2017, of which 200 billion dollars are for manufacturing and 70 billion dollars are for investment-related equipment and nearby industries. In addition, Of the $ 200 billion of manufacturing $ 200 billion invested in China, IoT is making significant changes, "said Christine Boles, general manager, Intel Industry and Energy Solutions.
Along with market potential, the industry is facing technical and business challenges such as interoperability, data analytics, business models, security and scalability, and Intel is using its extensive experience in computing and communications to help Address technical and business challenges.
Evolution of the Internet of Things: Toward Software Defined Machine
A major trend in the industry today is the consolidation of commonly dispersed subsystems in industrial equipment into a single computing platform that manages multiple applications for industrial equipment.For example, a current factory machine typically has multiple computing devices Such as one or more machine controllers, PLCs, HMIs, machine vision devices, data acquisition devices, safety controllers, etc. Device manufacturers are incorporating many of these functions into A higher performance computing device.
Christine believes that in the industrial system represented by the manufacturing industry, a series of changes in IoT can see that the Internet of Things process is phased in. The first phase is to connect the non-networked objects; the second phase is the all- The main emphasis is on "interconnectivity," such as how information is communicated between devices and how the information at the top and bottom of the production line is better used so that the production line can work better together. This will be the software-defined The Future; The third phase is the addition of autonomous and software-defined capabilities to the system to provide a truly autonomous software-defined experience.
At the same time, Christine said that at present, different manufacturers are at different stages of the three levels.For example, some textile factories are still in the manual stage, the manual means to carry information phones, such as recording temperature.For such factories , The first is to connect non-networked devices; there are some industries, such as the semiconductor industry, can be a series of communication standards will organically combine the upstream and downstream of the production line can be organic linkage, which is in the development of Internet of Things In addition, as the robotics industry is largely software-defined, it can be set according to different needs in the marketplace, so they are in the third phase of the Internet of Things.
In the next two years, Intel will focus on how to improve computing power to support customers' needs
"From our perspective, although industrial manufacturing is Intel's overall industrial development focus, we are more concerned with chip and chip level applications," said Xie Qingshan, product director, product marketing, IoT, Intel China.
At the same time, Xie Qingshan said that due to the geometric growth of customer demand for computing power, so Intel and this year and even the next two years will focus on how to improve computing power to support customer needs. Among them, there are three areas in the Industrial growth will be very fast.
The first is that artificial intelligence is in the field of industrial manufacturing, for example, predictive maintenance, which is a misjudgment of the failure rate of industrial production lines, which is a very effective means of improving industrial productivity.
Second, the use of machine vision is a particularly fast-growing demand for computing power, and in many places the Chinese government proposes strategies to replace people with machines in order to increase efficiency and improve quality, which is important in the process of replacing machines with people Is machine vision, with high-definition camera instead of the human eye to work.China's machine vision market and use, including the technical requirements are rapidly rising, which also on the basic chip and computing power put forward high demand.Therefore, Intel needs Efforts to enhance their product development to meet the market or customer requirements.
Third, the integration of various functions. Each module in the previous machine is completed by a separate module, the processor may be used separately. In order to improve efficiency and unified collaborative planning, from the user's point of view, I hope these functions are completed in a module which is the same from the chip manufacturer's point of view, can not replace several discrete chips with high-performance chips, which has great benefits to improve efficiency and cost. There is also a huge demand for chip computing, including peripheral interfaces, so Intel is also focusing on this one.
Intel won the Gold Award for Innovation at the 19th China International Industry Fair
The 19th China International Industry Fair was officially held in Shanghai from November 7 to November 11, 2017. It is noteworthy that the opening ceremony of the Expo and the award ceremony were held on the afternoon of June 6, in which Intel and Huawei jointly developed 'Adaptive Flexible Manufacturing Platform' was awarded the Gold Award for Innovation at the 19th China International Industry Fair. Intel and Huawei jointly developed an edge computing server that uses an Intel Xeon processor.
In this regard, Christine said, "With this Gold Award, we can see what potential we can explore and what value we create for our customers, together with our partners, using our capabilities and expertise." Let's look forward, In a world of intelligent interconnection, Intel will take full advantage of its own advantages in computing and hardware to drive the intelligent transformation of Chinese factories and speed up the process of the fourth industrial revolution.