Intel this morning is kicking off the second day of their Vision 2024 conference, the company’s annual closed-door business and customer-focused get-together. While Vision is not typically a hotbed for new silicon announcements from Intel – that’s more of an Innovation thing in the fall – attendees of this year’s show are not coming away empty handed. With a heavy focus on AI going on across the industry, Intel is using this year’s event to formally introduce the Gaudi 3 accelerator, the next-generation of Gaudi high-performance AI accelerators from Intel’s Habana Labs subsidiary.
The latest iteration of Gaudi will be launching in the third quarter of 2024, and Intel is already shipping samples to customers now. The hardware itself is something of a mixed bag in some respects (more on that in a second), but with 1835 TFLOPS of FP8 compute throughput, Intel believes it’s going to be more than enough to carve off a piece of the expansive (and expensive) AI market for themselves. Based on their internal benchmarks, the company expects to be able beat NVIDIA’s flagship Hx00 Hopper architecture accelerators in at least some critical large language models, which will open the door to Intel grabbing a larger piece of the AI accelerator market at a critical time in the industry, and a moment when there simply isn’t enough NVIDIA hardware to go around.
