During recording of the “Intel Unleashed: Engineering the Future” webcast, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger highlights “Ponte Vecchio,” Intel’s first exascale graphics processing unit. During the webcast on March 23, 2021, Gelsinger outlines the company’s path forward to manufacture, design and deliver leadership products and create long-term value for stakeholders. (Credit: Walden Kirsch/Intel Corporation)
Intel CEO has responded to NVIDIA’s recent CPU launch which is targeted at AI data centers and servers. CEO Pat Gelsinger states that when it comes to CPUs specialized for AI processing, Intel has a great portfolio and they are the leaders in this domain.
Intel CEO Hits Back at NVIDIA’s Grace ARM CPU Announcement, Recognizes Themselves As A Dramatic Leader of CPUs With Enhanced AI Capabilities
Earlier this week, NVIDIA announced its first CPU for data centers and AI cloud computing known as Grace. Based on the ARM architecture and making use of the Neoverse cores, NVIDIA is positioning the Grace CPU against x86 chips which primarily feature two rivals, Intel & AMD. The Grace CPU is expected to debut in 2023 with two supercomputers from CSCS & Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Now Intel holds an insanely huge CPU server market share, accounting for over 90% whereas the rest of the share belongs to AMD. AMD has been very competitive against Intel with their recent launches and they are further expected to gain market share with their EPYC Milan lineup that was also recently introduced.
With the announcement of NVIDIA’s Grace CPUs, a 3rd Major (non-x86) player is entering the field and has already contracted a deal for two major supercomputers. Intel is not the kind that goes off easy with such news and Intel’s CEO has issued the following response:
Nvidia today announced some new chips for the data center market, with a particular focus on speeding up artificial intelligence applications with standard chips known as central processing units, or CPUs. The stock market reacted quickly. What’s your competitive position with them?
We announced our Ice Lake [a new microprocessor for servers] last week with an extraordinarily positive response. And in Ice Lake, we have extraordinary expansions in the A.I. capabilities. [Nvidia is] responding to us. It’s not us responding to them. Clearly this idea of CPUs that are A.I.-enhanced is the domain where Intel is a dramatic leader.
We also have, with our Habana product line [a specialized A.I. chipmaker Intel bought in 2019], unquestionably laid out a very aggressive path and our cloud partnership with [hotlink]Amazon[/hotlink] is a great demonstration of that. So clearly, I’d say the idea of CPUs is Intel’s provenance. We’re now building A.I. into that and we expect this to be an area where we are on the offense, not the defense going forward.
Following the announcement of Grace CPU, NVIDIA stocks increased while Intel shares dropped, simultaneously. Intel’s CEO followed up by saying that even after the announcement of Grace, it is NVIDIA whose on the defense while they are on the offense. Pat also mentioned Intel’s Ice Lake (3rd Gen Xeon Scalable Family) as being an extraordinary chip offering extraordinary AI capabilities & called his company a dramatic leader in the AI-enhanced CPU segment.
“The takeaway is that Nvidia is serious about CPUs and will not be constrained by X86 owned by Intel and AMD,” Hans Mosesmann, an analyst at Rosenblatt Securities, said in a research note. “The level of platform innovation is mind-boggling and something that silicon competitors will be tasked to match for many, many years to come.”
The NVIDIA Grace CPU will be supported by the NVIDIA HPC software development kit and the full suite of CUDA and CUDA-X libraries, which accelerate more than 2,000 GPU applications, speeding discoveries for scientists and researchers working on the world’s most important challenges. NVIDIA will definitely see the main competition from Intel moving forward while AMD is also planning on investing in AI capabilities in its next-generation Genoa lineup.
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