Intel announces enterprise AI with Gaudi 3, AI open systems strategy

At the Intel Vision 2024 customer and partner conference, Intel (INTC) introduced the Intel Gaudi 3 accelerator to bring performance, openness and choice to enterprise generative AI, or GenAI, and unveiled a suite of new open scalable systems, next-gen products and strategic collaborations to accelerate GenAI adoption. With only 10% of enterprises successfully moving GenAI projects into production last year, Intel’s latest offerings address the challenges businesses face in scaling AI initiatives. The Intel Gaudi 3 AI accelerator will power AI systems with up to tens of thousands of accelerators connected through the common standard of Ethernet. Intel Gaudi 3 promises 4-times more AI compute for BF16 and a 1.5-times increase in memory bandwidth over its predecessor. In comparison to Nvidia (NVDA) H100, the company said, Intel Gaudi 3 is projected to deliver 50% faster time-to-train on average across Llama models with 7B and 13B parameters, and GPT-3 175B parameter model. Additionally, Intel Gaudi 3 accelerator inference throughput is projected to outperform the H100 by 50% on average1 and 40% for inference power-efficiency averaged2 across Llama 7B and 70B parameters, and Falcon 180B parameter models. Intel Gaudi 3 will be available to OEMs – including Dell Technologies (DELL), HPE (HPE), Lenovo (LNVGY) and Supermicro (SMCI) – in the second quarter of 2024. Intel also outlined its strategy for open scalable AI systems, including hardware, software, frameworks and tools. Intel’s approach enables a broad, open ecosystem of AI players to offer solutions that satisfy enterprise-specific GenAI needs. This includes equipment manufacturers, database providers, systems integrators, software and service providers, and others. It also allows enterprises to use the ecosystem partners and solutions that they already know and trust. Additionally, Intel announced collaborations with Google Cloud (GOOGL), Thales and Cohesity to leverage Intel’s confidential computing capabilities in their cloud instances.