Nvidia competition heats up as Intel, Google unveil new AI offerings

At its Vision 2024 conference, Intel (INTC) unveiled the Gaudi 3, an AI accelerator chip, saying it is both faster and more efficient than Nvidia (NVDA) H100 GPUs. The H100 is one of the company’s most popular chips, powering AI applications for companies such as Microsoft (MSFT) and Google (GOOGL). The latter is also in the spotlight on Tuesday after introducing Axion, its first Arm (ARM)-based, home grown CPU, at its Google Cloud Next conference in Las Vegas.

GAUDI 3: At the Intel Vision 2024 customer and partner conference, Intel introduced its Gaudi 3 accelerator and unveiled a suite of new open scalable systems, next-gen products, and strategic collaborations to accelerate GenAI adoption. 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 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 average and 40% for inference power-efficiency averaged 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, Thales and Cohesity to leverage Intel’s confidential computing capabilities in their cloud instances.

AXION PROCESSORS: Google announced Google Axion Processors, the company’s first Arm-based CPUs designed for the data center. The company says that “Axion processors combine Google’s silicon expertise with Arm’s highest performing CPU cores to deliver instances with up to 30% better performance than the fastest general-purpose Arm-based instances available in the cloud today, up to 50% better performance and up to 60% better energy-efficiency than comparable current-generation x86-based instances. That’s why we’ve already started deploying Google services like BigTable, Spanner, BigQuery, Blobstore, Pub/Sub, Google Earth Engine, and the YouTube Ads platform on current generation Arm-based servers and plan to deploy and scale these services and more on Axion soon.”

“Customers will be able to use Axion in many Google Cloud services including Google Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Dataproc, Dataflow, Cloud Batch, and more.  Arm-compatible software and solutions are now available on the Google Cloud Marketplace, and we’ve recently launched preview support for Arm-based instances migration in the Migrate to Virtual Machines service,” Google added.

PRICE ACTION: In afternoon trading, shares of Intel are fractionally up at $38.23, while rivals Nvidia and AMD (AMD) have dropped 3% to $846.56 and 1% to $14.12, respectively. Alphabet’s stock has gained about 1% to $155.92.