Intel (INTC.US) launched the artificial intelligence (AI) chip Gaudi3 at the "AIEverywhere" conference held on Thursday, hoping to gain a larger share of the booming AI hardware market. Gaudi3 is scheduled to be officially launched next year, where it will compete with other AI chips such as Nvidia's (NVDA.US) H100 and AMD's (AMD.US) upcoming MI300X. Intel says Gaudi3 will perform better than Nvidia's H100.
Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger hopes to ride the AI boom to revive the company's business, which has been hit hard by past missteps and the broader PC market slump. Meanwhile, long-time rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. has captured some of the PC and server markets, and some of Intel's biggest customers are now designing their own chips.
Pat Gelsinger believes that AI represents the arrival of a new era and creates huge opportunities. More sufficient, more powerful, and more cost-effective processing power is a key component of future economic growth. "The number of connected devices will increase fourfold in the next five years and will increase to 15 times in the next ten years."
Data shows that Intel Gaudi3 will use a 5nm process, with a bandwidth that is 1.5 times that of the previous generation Gaudi2 (7nm process), a BF16 power that is four times that of its predecessor, and a network computing power that is twice that of its predecessor. Gaudi3 is expected to be equipped with up to 128GB of HBM3e memory, which will greatly improve AI learning and training performance.
Intel said it expects Gaudi3 to capture a larger share of the market in 2024 with its leading AI chip suite due to growing and proven performance advantages, as well as extremely competitive TCO (total cost of ownership) and pricing advantages.
Intel also launched fifth-generation Xeon processors for enterprises and Core Ultra chips for personal computers (PCs). According to Intel, the fifth-generation Xeon brings more powerful AI to data centers, clouds, networks and edge computing. Its performance and efficiency have been greatly improved. In a variety of customer workload environments, the general computing performance of the previous generation has increased by an average of 21% and the energy consumption per watt has increased by an average of 36%. It is reported that this is the second major change to the Xeon processor in less than a year, which improves performance and capacity while reducing power consumption.
Intel claims that Xeon is the only mainstream data center processor with built-in AI acceleration. Compared with the fourth-generation Xeon launched in January this year, the fifth-generation Xeon has improved inference and fine-tuning capabilities by up to 42% on models with up to 20 billion parameters. It is also the only CPU with a consistent and continuously improving set of MLPerf training and inference AI benchmark results.
During the AIEverywhere event, IBM (IBM.US) disclosed that during testing, the query throughput of the fifth-generation Intel Xeon processor on the Microsoft Watsonx.data platform was 2.7 times higher than the previous generation. Google Cloud, which will deploy the fifth-generation Xeon next year, pointed out that Palo Alto Networks uses the built-in acceleration in the fourth-generation Xeon through Google Cloud, and the performance of its deep learning model for threat detection has been doubled.
In addition, the Core Ultra chip officially launched by Intel is suitable for laptops and desktop computers, allowing these PCs to directly apply AI functions. According to Intel, Core Ultra uses Intel's first on-chip AI accelerator for clients, a neural network processing unit referred to as NPU, which takes energy-efficient AI acceleration to a new level and increases energy consumption by 2.5 times compared to the previous generation. Intel also said that the Core Ultra chip includes more powerful gaming capabilities, and the increased graphics processing power can help programs such as Adobe Premiere run more than 40% faster.
Intel said that PCs equipped with Core UltraAI chips can now be purchased at select retailers in the United States. Next year, Core UltraAI chips will support more than 230 models from global notebook and PC manufacturers. Intel also predicts that by 2028, computers powered by AI chips will account for 80% of the PC market. Intel emphasized that it is cooperating with more than 100 software manufacturers to bring hundreds of applications enhanced by AI technology to the PC market. These highly creative, productive and interesting applications will change the PC user experience.