At the ‘AI Everywhere’ event, Intel was expected to announce the launch of Gaudi3, its AI accelerator to compete with NVIDIA’s H100.
Only a sneak peek, but not enough. “I like to just have one other little thing to show off here and they just bought it out of the lab,” walked in Pat Gelsinger, CEO of Intel with the first ever Gaudi3 processor, at the end of the conference. “They are not just on PowerPoints, They are real,” concluded Gelsinger and urged everyone to go do Christmas shopping.
The crowd wasn’t impressed. Given that NVIDIA and AMD have already announced their AI and HPC workload GPUs, everyone was expecting Intel to come up with an official announcement of Gaudi3, which was touted to be on par with its competitors.
Interestingly, AMD has also announced MI300X to compete with NVIDIA’s, but Intel didn’t do much.
All the tech
During Intel’s recent conference call, Gelsinger stated, “Our Gaudi roadmap remains on track with Gaudi3 out of the fab, now in packaging and expected to launch next year” Looking ahead to 2025, Falcon Shores will integrate our GPU and Gaudi capabilities into a unified product.
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. This is something that would give Intel the edge over others.
The latest unit bears resemblance to a sizable module, likely an OAM, featuring a substantial ASIC and numerous HBM3 (or HBM3E) memory stacks. The ASIC package appears notably larger than that of the Gaudi2, suggesting the presence of eight HBM3E stacks instead of six, as seen in the case of the Gaudi2.
According to information presented in a slide by Intel, the Gaudi3 adopts a dual-chiplet design, combining two processors rather than being a monolithic processor.
Intel is also planning to onboard another version of the AI accelerator superchip, Falcon Shores 2, by 2026, which would be based on the Gaudi3 architecture. “We have a simplified roadmap as we bring together our GPU and our accelerators into a single offering,” Gelsinger said. Though this is a far out vision, the reveal at the AI Everywhere conference also gives out some hope for the company.
A lot at stake
At the event, the company announced the launch of AI PCs and Xeon processors, but when it comes to deploying generative AI models on scale, Intel only announced Gaudi2 accelerators, and how it would be used to power the upcoming AI supercomputer, similar to Intel’s Aurora supercomputers, based on open standards.
Moreover, Sandra L. Rivera, executive VP of Intel said, “Gaudi2 delivers leadership price performance compared to the most popular GPUs based on the most recent MLperf training benchmarks,” which is 40% better when compared to H100 for training GPT-3 type models.
Though it is expected to launch next year, the chip company was planning the release of its Gaudi3 chip at its event, which would be a major game changer for the company. Gelsinger believes that the supercomputer that Intel is building will be the largest in Europe, powered by Gaudi3.
On the other hand, NVIDIA and AMD’s competition has been going on for a long while. Both the companies have been going on a spat to compete with each other and have been debunking each others’ claims about who has the fastest GPU. Meanwhile, NVIDIA is already ready to come up with its next superchip, GH200.
Currently, the ball is in NVIDIA’s court. AMD compared MI300X to NVIDIA H100, not GH200, which shows that it is possibly still a generation behind NVIDIA. Meanwhile, Intel compared its latest Xeon and Core Ultra Processors to AMD’s second last generation processors. This hints that Intel is two generations behind NVIDIA.
Gelsinger has projected that the GPU market size would be around $400 billion by 2027. This definitely gives room for a lot of competitions to thrive, and thus there is a lot expected from Gaudi3. But if Gaudi3 fails to deliver for Intel, the company would be years behind its competitors.
The post Gaudi3 is Intel’s Last Hope appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.