Fair to say Intel’s GPU plans do not at all times go to, er, plan. During Intel’s newest earnings name for highly-remunerated bean counters, the corporate’s new interim co-CEO let slip that its upcoming next-gen AI GPU has successfully been cancelled.
Known as Falcon Shores, it was supposed to switch Intel’s Gaudi 3 chip. But no extra. “Based on trade suggestions, we plan to leverage Falcon Shores as an inner check chip solely with out bringing it to market,” Michelle Holthaus mentioned.
Instead, Intel has switched its focus to the technology of AI GPU that comes subsequent, Jaguar Shores. “This will assist our efforts to develop a system-level resolution at rack scale with Jaguar Shores to handle the AI knowledge heart,” Holthaus mentioned.
Our understanding is that the issue with Intel’s AI GPUs is that they are all a bit naked bones as an providing. Where Nvidia will promote you a completely constructed up rack of GPUs with fancy interconnects, Intel does not have the identical mature and full product. Oh, and there is the minor matter of CUDA, Nvidia’s software program interface that enables builders to code in present pc languages and port proper over to Nvidia’s GPUs.
“One of the issues that we have discovered from Gaudi is it isn’t sufficient to simply ship the silicon. We want to have the ability to ship an entire rack scale resolution, and that is what we’re going to have the ability to do with Jaguar Shores,” Holthaus defined.
Without essentially wanting to bop on Intel’s grave with this one, let’s simply say the corporate does not precisely have one of the best file in terms of GPUs. Who can overlook Larrabee, the chip with zillions of tiny x86 cores that was cancelled again in 2010 however might need put Intel and certainly its just lately departed CEO Pat Gelsinger, who championed the Larrabee venture, on a totally totally different path.
Intel’s Arc GPUs have not precisely been a roaring success, both, even when its newest Intel Arc B580 board is a transparent step ahead. So, it will be a courageous name to foretell that Jaguar Shores will quickly be chasing Nvidia’s H100 and B200 GPUs out of AI knowledge facilities any time quickly.
In the meantime, ye olde Linux patch textual content strings have outed what seems to be references to Intel’s next-gen Celestial gaming GPU in high-performance discrete format, which tallies with latest feedback by Intel’s primary graphics rep Tom Petersen that the {hardware} for Celestial is principally finished and dusted.
So, Intel’s GPU efforts rumble on. Eventually, possibly one in every of them will actually land. We genuinely hope so, it will be nice for competitors.
