Intel Talks AI Strategy: Next-Gen Gaudi 3 & Falcon Shore Accelerators, 3rd Party Migration, China SKUs

14.03.2024 - 00:27 / wccftech.com / Hassan Mujtaba

Intel shared a few more updates on its AI strategy and accelerators including next-gen Gaudi 3 and Falcon Shores which reveal how the company is bringing AI to the enterprise and all aspects of the data center segment with its products and software stack.

Intel Lays Out AI & Accelerator Strategy: Gaudi 3 This Year, Falcon Shores Next Year, Gaudi SKUs For China & More

For AI, Intel has developed a full-on Enterprise AI stack, a combination of hardware and AI Applications/Software developed using open standards that are possible with OpenVINO & the Intel Developer Cloud oneAPI & Synapse. The hardware is segmented into three branches, data center (Scalable Systems, Accelerators, CPUs), Networking (Open Standards and Configurability, Infrastructure), and Client & Edge (AI PC, NPU, GPU, CPU).

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NVIDIA has long been the sole provider of high-performance and capable AI accelerators in the market but that has changed with Intel and AMD along with others prepping up new solutions & they look very performant (on paper for now). Intel wants to establish itself as a clear alternative to the market leader and at the same time, they are going to establish leadership in specific markets and workloads. We recently saw benchmarks from Stability AI showcasing Intel's Gaudi 2 hardware offering a 3x boost at a similar price.

Intel states that in terms of pricing, Gaudi 2 is based on the same process as the A100 which is TSMC's 7nm but the key difference is that their customers are seeing up to 3x the performance improvement in Stability Diffusion and Generation AI workloads which means that you can get a lot more cost savings with using Gaudi 2 than NVIDIA's A100. The Gaudi 2 hardware also excels over the latest H100 GPU in certain workloads which is exactly what Intel is gunning for now and will scale the leadership beyond from here.

Coming to the roadmap, Intel still has Gaudi 3 positioned as the follow-up to Gaudi 2 and Falcon Shores beyond that. Intel stated that Gaudi 3 accelerators are already in its validation labs right now and will be generally available in Q3 2023.

Gaudi 3 will also be available through a broad ecosystem of OEMs and also in the Intel developer cloud. In terms of hardware, the Gaudi 3 AI accelerator will utilize the same high-performance architecture as Gaudi 2 with significant advances in computing capabilities. You are getting 4x the compute, 2x the networking bandwidth, 1.5x the HBM memory bandwidth, and higher capacities to allow for larger models.

The Falcon Shores will be the first GPU architecture designed solely for AI workloads. It combines the best of the Gaudi AI IP as well as