Semiconductor pioneer Intel may have fallen behind in the AI chip race, but it’s doing everything it can to catch up.
Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger unveiled the Xeon 6 processor on Tuesday at COMPUTEX, an annual technology trade show in Taiwan — two days after rival Nvidia and one day after Advanced Micro Devices. presented next-generation AI chips. Gelsinger said the company’s recent processor will provide better performance and energy efficiency than its predecessor for high-density workloads in data centers. Intel also announced that prices for its Gaudi 2 and Gaudi 3 AI accelerators are lower than those of its rival chips.
Chip manufacturer presented the Gaudi 3 AI accelerator in April, which it claims has more AI processing power, network bandwidth and memory bandwidth than its predecessor, Gaudi 2, to scale up AI training and inference on enormous language models (LLM). It also said the AI accelerator was “significantly ahead of Nvidia.”
“Customers are looking for effective, cost-effective generational AI training and inference solutions,” Gelsinger said at COMPUTEX. “They started turning to alternatives like Gaudi. They want choice. They want open software and hardware solutions and solutions that deliver time-to-market solutions with dramatically lower total cost of ownership [total cost of ownership]”
Gelsinger also mentioned Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who said that established processors like those made by Intel have not kept up with the era of artificial intelligence.
“Contrary to what Jensen would have you believe, Moore’s law is alive and well,” Gelsinger said. “I think of it like the Internet was 25 years ago, it’s so massive. We see this as the fuel that will drive the semiconductor industry to reach $1 trillion by the end of the decade.”
Intel also revealed details about the architecture of its Lunar Lake processors, which it says will be necessary “to further advance the AI PC category.” Lunar Lake is expected to be delivered in the third quarter of this year, “in advance of the holiday shopping season,” the company said.
Robert Hallock, vice president and general manager of Client AI at Intel, told Quartz in an interview that its AI PC chips will become increasingly essential over the next few years as more applications integrate AI capabilities and need hardware that will be able to continue to deliver brisk and effective performance. Hallock added that Intel is one of the few companies in the world that offers artificial intelligence development in both hardware and software.
