The move is part of Intel’s declared war on IBM, for which it signed an alliance with Oracle. Saffron’s software takes data on a topic provided by the client and then looks for similarities and relationships to “learn” about that topic.

Saffron has purportedly created software that mimics human reasoning and memory that it applies to problems for clients as well as its own natural language processing that augments whatever vocabulary the client submits, since many professions have their own industry jargon.

The word on the street is that the deal will help Intel harness the power of the cloud by building computers that can help people make sense of the digital information that threatens to overwhelm them.

Chipzilla wants to put as many chips as it can into what are called the edge devices—the laptops, watches, gateways or any devices that we may interact with or that gathers information from the world and feeds it back to the network.

It can also make general purpose chips for the servers that process all of this information and generally power the data centres that comprise “the cloud.”

The deal sits well with Intel is spending $16.7 billion to buy Altera. Altera makes programmable chips that lets a company tweak its silicon whenever it changes its software so the hardware is optimised for the specific code the company is running.

Intel’s Altera was a bet on dedicated processors for artificial intelligence. With Saffron it has AI software which can fit on both the server side with Altera and the device side.