Intel has made several announcements — Xeon server processors for data centers, Gaudi 3 AI chip and Lunar Lake laptop chip — at the Computex 2024.
Intel aims to grab data center market share from AMD. Intel said its Gaudi 3 artificial intelligence accelerator chips would be priced much lower than its rivals’ chips.
Xeon 6 server
Intel Xeon 6 E-core (code-named Sierra Forest) is available beginning today. Xeon 6 P-cores (code-named Granite Rapids) are expected to launch next quarter.
Xeon 6 E-core enables rack-level consolidation of 3-to-1, providing a rack-level performance gain of up to 4.2x and performance per watt gain of up to 2.6x when compared with 2nd Gen Intel Xeon processors on media transcode workloads.
Gaudi 3 accelerator kit
Intel said that a Gaudi 3 accelerator kit, which includes eight of the AI chips, sells for about $125,000, estimated to be two-thirds the cost of comparable competitive platforms. The earlier generation Gaudi 2 has a list price of $65,000, estimated to be one-third the cost of comparable competitive platforms.
Intel Gaudi 3 accelerator is projected to offer up to 40 percent faster time-to-train versus the equivalent size Nvidia H100 GPU cluster and up to 15 percent faster training throughput for a 64-accelerator cluster versus Nvidia H100 on the Llama2-70B model. Intel Gaudi 3 is projected to offer an average of up to 2x faster inferencing versus Nvidia H100, running popular LLMs such as Llama-70B and Mistral-7B.
Intel has tied up with 10 global system providers, including six new providers who announced they’re bringing Intel Gaudi 3 to market. Today’s new collaborators include Asus, Foxconn, Gigabyte, Inventec, Quanta and Wistron, expanding the production offerings from leading system providers Dell, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Lenovo and Supermicro.
AMD and Nvidia do not discuss pricing of their chips, Reuters news report said. A comparable HGX server system with eight Nvidia H100 AI chips can cost more than $300,000, according to custom server vendor Thinkmate.
Intel revealed the details of the Gaudi 3 AI chip in April and has positioned it as a considerably cheaper and viable alternative to Nvidia’s H100 chips.
Lunar Lake
Intel said its laptop chip, called Lunar Lake, uses 40 percent less power and more than 3 times the AI compute. Intel said it will ship the chip in the third quarter.
AI PCs are projected to make up 80 percent of the PC market by 2028, according to Boston Consulting Group.
