In the fierce competition for dominance in AI hardware, Intel sent down the gauntlet to Nvidia. CEO Pat Gelsinger revealed the price of Intel’s upcoming Gaudi 2 and Gaudi 3 AI accelerator processors this week at Computex, and the figures are startling.
Usually, prices for such products are kept under wraps, but Intel has broken with convention and released some actual numbers. When purchased separately, the flagship Gaudi 3 accelerator will retail for about $15,000, which is 50% less expensive than Nvidia’s rival H100 data center GPU.
Even though it is less powerful, the Gaudi 2 offers a significant price reduction over Nvidia. System suppliers will be able to purchase an 8-chip Gaudi 2 accelerator package for $65,000. According to Intel, that’s only one-third the cost of equivalent configurations from Nvidia and other rivals.
The same eight-accelerator kit configuration is $125,000 more expensive for the Gaudi 3. According to Intel, at that high-end performance category, it is two-thirds less expensive than competing products.
Gaudi 3 pricing should be understood in the light of Nvidia’s recently released Blackwell B100 GPU, which sells for about $30,000. In the meantime, the B200, a powerful Blackwell CPU+GPU combo, retails for about $70,000. Though Intel still has a long way to go, these stark price disparities could assist.
Pricing is, of course, only one factor in the equation. Both software ecosystem and performance are important factors to take into account. Regarding that, Intel asserts that the Gaudi 3 performs as well as or better than Nvidia’s H100 in a number of significant workloads related to AI training and inference.
According to Intel-cited benchmarks, in big 8,192-chip clusters, the Gaudi 3 can achieve up to 40% quicker training times than the H100. According to the business, even a smaller 64-chip Gaudi 3 arrangement gives 15% greater throughput than the H100 on the well-liked LLaMA 2 language model. For AI inference, Intel claims a 2x speed advantage over the H100 on models like LLaMA and Mistral.
Though the Gaudi chips make use of open standards like Ethernet to facilitate deployment, they are not optimized for Nvidia’s widely used CUDA platform, which is what the majority of AI applications currently uses. It might be difficult to persuade businesses to rewrite their code for Gaudi.
Intel claims to have partnered with at least ten significant server suppliers to promote adoption, including new Gaudi 3 partners like Asus, Foxconn, Gigabyte, Inventec, Quanta, and Wistron. Well-known brands including Supermicro, Dell, HPE, and Lenovo are also included.
Nevertheless, Nvidia is a serious player in the data center industry. They held a 73 percent market share in the last quarter of 2023, and their share has been steadily increasing, undermining the positions held by AMD and Intel. Not much has changed in the consumer GPU market, where Nvidia holds an 88 percent market share.
Intel’s New Gaudi 3 Accelerators Undercut Nvidia GPUs as AI Race Heats Up
Intel has officially unveiled its Gaudi 3 AI accelerators, positioning them as a cost-effective alternative to Nvidia’s dominant GPUs in the rapidly evolving AI hardware market. Designed to power AI training and inference workloads, the Gaudi 3 chips promise higher efficiency at a lower price, challenging Nvidia’s stronghold in the sector.
With AI adoption surging across industries, companies are seeking affordable and scalable computing solutions. Intel claims that Gaudi 3 offers better price-performance efficiency compared to Nvidia’s flagship H100 GPUs, making it an attractive option for enterprises investing in large-scale AI models.
Gaudi 3 features improved memory bandwidth, energy efficiency, and computing power, catering to AI applications such as deep learning, natural language processing, and generative AI. The accelerators are expected to be widely adopted by cloud service providers and AI-driven companies looking for cost-effective alternatives to Nvidia’s expensive GPU solutions.
As competition in the AI chip market intensifies, Intel’s aggressive pricing strategy with Gaudi 3 could disrupt Nvidia’s dominance, offering businesses a compelling choice for AI acceleration. The launch highlights Intel’s commitment to strengthening its position in the AI and high-performance computing space amid increasing demand for AI infrastructure.
Group Media Publication
Construction, Infrastructure and Mining
General News Platforms – IHTLive.com
Entertainment News Platforms – https://anyflix.in/
Legal and Laws News Platforms – https://legalmatters.in/
Podcast Platforms – https://anyfm.in/
%20/23%20cimr%204.jpg "India is selected to host the ICCC Conference in 2027.")