Intel made a slew of announcements during its Vision 2024 event today, including deep-dive details of its new Gaudi 3 AI processors, which it claims offer up to 1.7X the training performance, 50% better inference, and 40% better efficiency than Nvidia’s market-leading H100 processors, but for significantly less money. Intel also announced new branding for its data center CPU portfolio, with the Granite Rapids and Sierra Forest chips now branded as the new ‘Xeon 6’ family. Those chips are on track to come to market this year and add support for the new performance-boosting standardized MXFP4 data format, which you can read about here. Intel also announced that it is developing an AI NIC ASIC for Ethernet networking along with an AI NIC chiplet that will be used in its future XPU and Guadi 3 processors while also being made available to external customers through Intel Foundry, but it didn’t share more details on these networking products. Nvidia’s dominance in AI infrastructure and software is undisputed. Still, Intel, like AMD, is looking to carve out a position as the premier alternative to Nvidia as the industry continues to struggle with Nvidia’s crushing AI GPU shortages. To that end, Intel also outlined the full breadth of its AI enablement programs, which stretch from hardware to software, as it looks to gain traction in the booming AI market that Nvidia and AMD currently dominate. Intel’s efforts focus on developing its partner ecosystem to deliver complete Gaudi 3 systems while also working to build an open enterprise software stack to serve as an alternative to Nvidia’s proprietary CUDA.
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