Intel is all set for its ‘AI Everywhere’ event coming on December 14, with a bunch of AI announcements, which it touts would usher in its top place in the generative AI realm.
The Chip company is planning the release of its Gaudi3 AI accelerator chip at its event, which would be a major game changer for the company. CEO Pat Gelsinger believes that the supercomputer that Intel is building will be the largest in Europe. He even hinted at Gaudi3, which according to him, would be two times faster than Gaudi2.
To put it in perspective, this comes after Intel has already been providing Gaudi2 AI chips for training models. Interestingly, Gaudi2 works 2.4 times faster than the NVIDIA A100, and is almost coming close to the H100 Hopper GPU.
Gaudi3 is expected to arrive with a 5nm chip. The accelerators are set to provide a significant boost with up to 4 times the BFloat16 capabilities, double the compute power, 1.5 times the network bandwidth, and a 1.5 times increase in HBM capacities (144 GB compared to 96 GB). Looking ahead to 2025, the successor to Gaudi3, Falcon Shores, will merge the AI capabilities of Gaudi with the powerful GPUs from Intel, all within a single package.
All about AI?
Intel is embarking on a bold journey in AI to compete with NVIDIA, AMD. At Intel Innovation 2023 in September, the company revealed its ambitious roadmap for the next few years, making it clear that they are going all in on AI. This includes their monster 288-core Xeon CPU, based on Emerald Rapids architecture, that’s coming next year.
The company has also announced that Stability.AI would purchase a Gaudi2-based AI supercomputer with Xeon processors overseeing 4,000 Gaudi2 accelerators.
What caught the industry’s attention were the processors in the pipeline such as Arrow Lake, Lunar Lake, and Panther Lake scheduled for 2024 and 2025. These processors represent a significant leap forward in Intel’s pursuit of technological excellence.
Intel is planning to onboard another version of AI accelerator superchip, Falcon Shores 2, by 2026. “We have a simplified roadmap as we bring together our GPU and our accelerators into a single offering,” CEO Pat Gelsinger said. Though this is a far out vision, the close by announcements are no joke as well.
Furthermore, Intel’s Falcon Shores chips were originally conceived as a fusion of CPU and GPU cores, representing the company’s inaugural venture into the ‘XPU’ architecture for high-performance computing. Nonetheless, a few months ago, Intel astounded the industry by opting for a GPU-only approach and deferring the chip’s release until 2025. The company’s voyage into the realm of AI and GPUs has encountered a series of twists and turns.
The focus on developers
The announcement on Meteor Lake, set to launch on December 14, was undoubtedly a headline-grabber because as CEO Pat Gelsinger said, the processor will “power-efficient AI acceleration and local inference on the PC”.
Gelsinger emphasised the company’s commitment to engineering excellence and showcased its efforts to democratise AI with the “AI PC” concept, which is similar to AMD’s Ryzen AI PCs. This innovation is made possible by Intel’s forthcoming “Meteor Lake” laptop chip, which incorporates new AI data-crunching features.
The AI PC concept aims to bring AI capabilities directly to personal computers, allowing users to run generative AI chatbots, like ChatGPT, locally, without relying on cloud data centres, and even for inference models such as Llama 2.
Moreover, to compete with AMD’s ROCm and NVIDIA’s CUDA, developers can utilise the oneAPI programming model to build and optimise AI and high-performance computing workloads. In addition, Intel has revealed Project Strata, a commercial software platform set to launch in 2024, aimed at supporting distributed edge infrastructure and applications with modular building blocks and premium services.
Focusing on developers, Intel had already announced the general availability of its Intel Developer Cloud platform, offering developers the opportunity to test and deploy AI and high-performance computing applications with the latest CPUs, GPUs, and AI accelerators.
The platform includes access to fifth-generation Xeon Scalable processors, Intel Data Center GPU Max Series, Intel Gaudi2 deep learning processors, and Intel software and tools.
All of this clearly shows that Intel might make a significant mark on December 14, as the road it’s taking with Gaudi3, upgrades to Xeon for AI PC, and the prowess of Gaudi2, all hints towards just that.
While Intel navigates its strategic adjustments, it’s noteworthy that NVIDIA has also taken a substantial leap by venturing into the CPU market with the GH200 supercomputer, which it has already started rolling out. This expansion into CPUs complements NVIDIA’s existing prowess in GPUs and AI technologies, while venturing into the CPU market.
AMD is also all-in on AI compute by partnering with Microsoft, Meta, and several OEM companies. At the AMD Advancing AI event, the company has unveiled various lines of AI announcements including the Instinct MI300X AI accelerators to compete with NVIDIA H100, updates to ROCm, and Ryzen AI PCs for on-device computing.
