Intel is Gunning for NVIDIA

in blasted on stage at its Vision 2024 event with some news Papa's little baby here man look at this big boy yeah and you know I I sort of looked at the prior decade as sort of boring you know we made PCI gen a little bit faster we made DDR the next increment you we kicked up the thermal envelope a little you know we added a few more ques and we said okay it's a good chip boring definitely a different approach from Nvidia let's see if they're excited about anything gouty [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] 3 you know huge advancements okay still a different approach but that's better I am the sound effect but what we really care about is the marketing music behind it you might remember nvidia's brainwashing music previously this the part this and we're concerned about if intel has an answer to that in the township of quo where many folks lacked Vision Chief geek patch and sales guy shell were shopkeepers on a mission they thought what quo needed was a spark of inspiration so they whipped up a a batch of woohoo chips they knew would cause a sensation a business exploded with lions out the door what the Intel just got done with its Vision 2024 keynote event and you can guess what they were talking about ai ai ai a a ai ai ai ai ai ai ai ai ai ai but Intel is absolutely taking this seriously and actually so is Google both companies announced their plans for AI EX accelerators and both of them appear to be aiming at Nvidia to try and knock them down a few pegs if not maybe later eventually try and take the crown Nvidia has been asserting absolute and total dominance over the AI market for some time now and has been expanding more into the software side of things which is probably caused for concern for its competitors because they start to create this ecosystem where if you want AI anything you're attached somehow to Nvidia and in CEO Pat Galer took some direct shots in the vision 2024 keynote industry is quickly moving away from proprietary Cuda models and gouty is the only Benchmark alternative to the Nvidia h100 for training llms and it's actually not the first time that Galer made comments about Cuda having maybe a limited lifespan back in around 2008 or so before he was CEO at Intel he had a comment about Cuda being an interesting footnote in the annals of of History uh so and looking forward to seeing how Google autot transcribes that word we'll find out I'm not going to change it so whatever it comes up with we'll leave it there maybe it'll be like when nvidia's Auto transcript from the keynote said to connect anwers to the Omniverse digital twin fun fact they changed it after our video I was sad before that this video is brought to you by lean Lee and the o1d Evo RGB case the o1d Evo RGB is an updated entry to the famed lineup retaining heavy support for fan mounts Drive Mount locations and flexibility on component mounting such as two options to the power supply the o1d Evo rgb's dual chamber approach aims to maximize cable storage on the backside to streamline Cable Management coupling this with a unique vertical GPU Mount to showcase the most expensive part in most systems learn more at the link in the description below regardless of whether you're using any of this Hardware today or you're even in that part of the industry you will probably be using it in some form at some point that's either going to be directly as all of this stuff comes down to Consumer it does tend to go that way just less powerful we see npus and the CPUs today which are AI accelerators built into Hardware that are meant for accelerating these so-called AI tasks uh and even if you're not going to use that stuff probably consumption via services online is the next likely route so we haven't seen Intel AMD and Nvidia be this amped up and aggressively competitive in quite some time it's clear that they see a huge money opportunity here and they're all going for a land grab and what they see as a new world actually there's some new markets here too not just software and selling those solutions to companies but also there's some talk of manufacturing targeting things that would be traditionally seen as not a consumer of this Ultra high-end type of uh accelerator CPU GPU whatever it may be so anyway Intel's event this year debuted its gudy 3 accelerator and also some new CPU so those are the primary to announcements they also talked about software they talked about ethernet as an alternative to EnV link and pushing some development in the ethernet space and Intel directly targeted nvidia's h100 as a head-to-head comparison for performance on the hardware side so that's kind of big news because the h100 has been backordered into Oblivion there's a big opportunity there for any other Hardware vendor to strike for companies that either can't wait online because they need it now or companies that aren't big enough to get a spot high up enough in the line uh so it will now have Blackwell to compete with as well with its gouty 3 parts and Intel seems to be aware we'll talk about this later in this video uh that they are not going to be the number one immediately but they are still trying to line up as competition Google and AMD are ramping up their efforts this year as well in the same space and we expect to see more from AMD at compy Tex this year now for G3 it was joined by Zeon 6 announcements the Zeon 6 it lacks a prime number you might have noticed that from the six and that to us is concerning because Intel has threes and fives and sevens if intel has depleted its prime number Supply it's over I guess there's the nine but the vision 2024 keynote with CEO Pat Galer wasn't as information dense as nvidia's GTC keynote but there was still a lot of good detail for us to cover along with our Impressions on Intel's General positioning strategy in the exploding AI compute market and because gaming and crypto have gotten too boring for them to talk about boring AI is the newest craze we'll see to what extent it sticks around in this capacity but that's what everyone's talking about now and at least some of these things can be deployed for non deep learning or machine learning use cases as well but everybody is gunning for NVIDIA right now currently they have a combination of leading hardware and software Solutions but also a massive head start on some in-house designed Solutions like IO nvlink for example was huge for NVIDIA in this year's Blackwell keynote and the company also went multi-chip with its approach to Silicon Intel is countering with a push for more open Solutions including relying on ethernet instead of NV link and it's taking an angle that's actually somewhat familiar to amd's approach to marketing gpus and developing them which is that both companies are promoting a level of openness and focusing marketing on non-proprietary Solutions and that is clearly aimed at Nvidia so or at least we think so anyway it seems like it it may be a sort of enemy of my enemy type of situation for these companies uh and one of the biggest advancements for NVIDIA again based on our exposure to the side of the market has been the the multiple uh silicon approach to Blackwell and also the EnV link solution we talked about that in our Nvidia coverage giving some opinions and uh some of the detail about the news from that event but Jensen's modern definition of a GPU has changed somebody used to say you know you guys make gpus and we do but this is what a GPU looks like to me when somebody says GPU I see this and that's going to be a consideration for all of its competitors because regardless of what you call it it is actually uh not just the literal GPU silicon anymore that matters Jensen Juan was absolutely right in that sense because these devices need to talk to each other at speeds that don't hamstring them significantly and so that's where these IO Solutions and interconnects and things like that come in and that's something that Intel talked about in its Vision keynote other critical things that customers are saying is boy how do I Stitch these together well there's some proprietary Solutions available we also see that the ultra ethernet Consortium and the work that we're driving is standing up to fill this scale up and scale out networking domain and through UE Intel is revolutionizing building on ethernet networking for AI fabrics for the future and we'll be introducing an array of AI optimized ethernet Solutions this lineup will include Cutting Edge AI Nick cards that will be delivering standard Nick Solutions it will also include AI chiplets that will enable for our customers and partners in Intel Foundry we're not experts in this space of AI we talk about gaming Hardware this stuff's cool to us it's fun to cover because it's interesting uh technologically it's fun to to study and read about and some of it does come to Consumer but as far as we understand this Market again coming from our perspective of non-experts in this so-called AI era uh as far as we understand it it seems to me that the approach to ethernet or some open standard here would be critical for all these non- Nvidia companies to in some form collaborate on because it may need to be a strength and numbers effort against the Behemoth that is NVIDIA now and that if they all go off and develop their own standards and proprietary Solutions then uh they they'll lack that focused effort in numbers but ultimately what we took away from Intel's key note was that if you are a company with big compute or AI needs you go to Intel for the same reason that you go to Waffle House at 3:00 a.m. they're open and they're cheap it's not an insult by the way that if I weren't a fan of 3: a.m. Waffle House why would I inex why would I inexplicably have this sign that I probably shouldn't have the answer is there's a security company founded by X Waffle House staff that's how I knew they were good at security moving on CEO Pat Galino ped how beneficial open platforms like pytorch are and repeated stated the value proposition and lower total cost of ownership or TCO of its solution versus the proprietary and expense of competition the competition again of course being Nvidia everyone already knows which company is number one right now in the compute Market it's not even a question you pull up Nvidia stock numbers and it becomes pretty clear what is uncertain though is which company is going to be number two in the longer term because everybody is trying to get into this even companies that are aren't traditional silicon manufacturers like AMD Intel and Nvidia we don't think Intel or AMD would admit what's going on here is a fight for second place but that's kind of what's happening right now you have to get there before fighting for first but that doesn't mean Intel isn't trying to win the top spot according to Galer and Intel the new gouty 3 accelerator chip can do llm related generative AI tasks at what they say in at least some scenarios is 40 to 50% faster than nvidia's h100 we don't have a way to validate that that's not the kind of testing we do but that's the claim and Intel is also trying to reach manufacturing clients uh which this we thought was pretty interesting because this is a trend we've seen in Nvidia as well where uh Nvidia kind of kicked this off but targeting places like factories warehouses uh facilities that traditionally you might not associate with these super intensive computational needs maybe Amazon kind of a side for their logistical efforts and Company like that but they are both targeting this sector which opens up probably some new uh client base that they might not have had before and we think that's due to a recognition that uh in this instance you could start using things like AI deep learning machine learning whatever to either fuel things like robotics so like Amazon does with uh using robots in the workforce and some level of AI and automation mixed together to pick in place or pack the right products and it can definitely also be used for more advanced Logistics like routing for all of the various delivery vehicles uh and the various modes of transport involved in between point A and B this is a a quote Intel was direct and its Outreach to that sector here's what they said normally right you know remember manufacturing Supply chains those kind of things you know the developers get the cool PCS and then the mediocre ones you know go to the white collar workers and then the crap ones okay we'll give those to the manufactur facturing no call your head of it it is time for a pcai refresh because use cases like this show extraordinary value for Fleet upgrades now there's more to all this than just Hardware of course so they also talked about software but we'll start with the gouty 3 accelerator this was Intel's biggest announcement for the event as far as uh we're concerned anyway and technically super micro accidentally leaked it early on stage we also showing a real G 3 system the world's first G 3 system new I haven't even announced it yet we're a little bit ahead okay I encourage everybody to go to our boost just check it out genuinely a really good save though the package has 16 total silicon tiles or chiplets the two largest in the middle contain 64 tensor cores eight Matrix math engines a media engine and 96 MB of SRAM cache there's also IO which is made up of 24 200 GB ethernet connections along the left and 16 pcie Gen 5 Lanes on the right the top and bottom have links for the hbm2e memory which are the uh eight mediumsized tiles that you see along the edges there the total memory capacity for gudy 3 is 128 GB with 3.7 terab per second of bandwidth and it'll be available as a pcie addin card with a 600 watt TDP so that's again the big difference from Nvidia not using nvlink of course for performance a single gouty 3 is listed at 1835 teraflops of fp8 performance scaling up to Universal baseboard which as we understand it is what would go inside a compute server with eight accelerators bring that up to 14.6 pedop flops of fp8 it also have over 1 terab of hbm2e with 29.6 terabytes per second of bandwidth and 9.6 tabes per second of bidirectional networking just a quick note here as well it appears that Galaxy might have misspoken on stage he said that the memory is hbm 3E all of the slides and the white paper though indicate hbm2 e and Nvidia made a a similar transpositional mistake with hbm in its presentation so maybe it's just an hbm thing and Intel is excited about it man look at this big boy yeah I always bring Big Brother along with me nothing says giant mega Corporation hosts AI keynote quite like the phrase Big Brother most of the performance metrics that Intel provided were listed as comparisons to nvidia's h100 or just sort of Standalone Intel claims gudy 3 is 40% faster in time to train and 50% more power efficient than nvidia's h100 in large language models that's in a specific workload though as this chart clearly shows that it's actually a give and take between gudy 3 and the h100 marked as the Nvidia 100 here to make sure at least one person gets confused and thinks that means means black well one more thing on gudy after its stage announcement Intel also posted its gudy 3 AI accelerator white paper with significantly more detail a lot of this goes beyond the scope of what we typically cover but there's a couple interesting diagrams Worth showing this block diagram shows the multi- diey approach that Intel is taking in this diagram you can see two dieses separated horizontally across the center and flanking hbm 2E modules on the sides the orientation is different from the one shown in some of the slides previously the whole white pap paper gives a relatively deep detailing of the capabilities including a ton of first-party numbers against the h100 and also additional diagrams showing PCB layout that one's kind of cool uh they also show workflow canonical pipelines and detail the capabilities of the hardware we thought this diagram of their scaleout cluster architectures was cool as well acting like a sort of map between uh clusters here but we'll leave the white paper here since some of the details in the document go beyond our scope and knowledge we did want to bring it to everyone's attention though just in case interested in this type of Technology briefing it's out there available publicly Intel also announced it's Zeon 6 CPU so we'll get into those now uh the first one will be Sierra Forest or Papa's little baby why what why do all the executives do this Papa's here it's Intel's first volume part made with the Intel 3 process node that we're aware of and it'll be available this quarter it's entirely composed of ecores leading to a quoted 2.4x Improvement in performance per watt versus the previous generation a Intel did a comparison of 200 racks of servers going down to 72 with Zeon 6 based on the performance per watt metrics there's also a PE core design or performance core design that I'll follow up later that is called Granite Rapids and I had to double check my notes to not get swapped on the names because AMD has CPUs in the 9,000 desktop series coming out probably it's not like 100% confirmed that's the name of them but it's new CPUs coming out later this year will be called Granite Ridge Intel Granite Rapids the way to think about it is Intel has lots of lakes and water featured code names so Rapids Water they've got a nice theme going on Intel didn't share performance or efficiency numbers for those likely because they're probably more similar to the outgoing generation there was also a small segment on Intel's upcoming mobile client CPUs code named lunar Lake these are Central to what Intel is calling that AI PC it's a magical new Revolution and personal computing and it's something that every business should buy immediately tell made that very clear it's like if you don't buy these you're behind just think of all the other people buying AI PCS for their employees at their businesses you can do so much AI with the AI and the AI PC it's just there's so much AI in those PCS we we have to get it out we have to rescue it Papa's little baby seriously Galer was doing everything except begging all the CEOs in the audience to buy new laptops and Michael Dell the founder of Dell even got one for free from this guy it's it's been a lot of fun you know working super closely together lunar lake is quoted as having three times the AI performance as the current core Ultra lineup with 45 npu tops of performance 3x is a huge leap but it's not really surprising to us since this is a follow-up to a first generation product and uh things are accelerating rapidly right now Intel listed Microsoft co-pilot the Adobe site zoom and teams as the applications with new AI functions and finally new CPUs with third generation npus code named Panther Lake are in production now according to Intel now for the software stack so Intel also talked a little bit about this uh was light on the details it's an area where Nvidia is making big moves right now they spent a lot of their presentation talking about it Intel's jumping in on the software side and uh the main takeaway is that Intel is also providing these curated pip lines in a similar way to nvidia's Nims which is their inference microservices that we covered last month and Intel additionally talked about rag tell me they have garbage data yes it's clear that the business world is legitimately excited about retrieval augmented generation or rag where you have a pre-trained llms response take a separate data set or document into consideration in practice this means an llm shouldn't need to be trained with proprietary or sensitive data uh in order to reference or know it and critically it can cite a source for the data Intel showed this off by having an employee working in one of its silicon Fabs using an llm running locally on the laptop to identify Parts information about a contamination incident this was clearly staged but llms with rag really do seem to have potential for being useful in a business setting so some closing thoughts here again uh we like to cover this stuff because it's interesting it's different it is cool to learn about technology in general and a lot this is hardware even with the software side stuff uh but because we're not an AI focused Outlet sometimes it gives us maybe a unique or a different perspective on these types of events where we're looking at it more strictly from a what does this mean for a consumer ultimately at the end of the day whether that's uh way down the line as a user of a service that uses these products and software Solutions or if it's literal use of a solution that eventually gets sold to you like something uh such as an npu in a laptop uh so that's kind of our approach to this type of coverage and um that's how we like to think about it now Intel knows it's going to need time to catch up to Nvidia and it wasn't hiding that fact in a statement actually uh it sounded like geler was almost asking investors to just hold on a little bit longer we're getting there you know everything I've talked about today it's not going to happen overnight but it's also not going to take long and that statement is probably the most indicative from this keynote of the company's General mindset right now which is that it's not positioning itself as having bested Nvidia it's not saying we've defeated them that's it we're number one now uh what it is instead saying is that it's working on it and that acknowledgement is kind of interesting because that's not typical it's become more common which is probably a good thing uh but Intel in years past say about a decade ago actually let's go back to the snake oil thing it's like months ago but a decade ago in particular I remember being at event where they clearly did not have anything noteworthy it was a refresh of a refresh of a refresh this is like can't make 10 nanometer work era of Intel so we're talking 14 nanometer quadruple plus and I remember being at some of those events and uh Intel talking big game about how much of a market leader it is how revolutionary these products are and it does seem like there's a little bit more humility in this announcement they were still still bragging about a lot but it's a different tone than the Intel that we encountered uh in the consumer space until AMD kind of kicked it in the ass a little bit and and maybe taught it to not sit too long on Old technology so it's we'll see where it's going it does seem like all of these companies are are behaving a little bit differently lately with this new AI craze there is a certain level of competitive aggression not necessarily in a negative sense but in a they're they're trying to take each other's market share in a new space sense and um that indicates to us that they see this as obviously a massive Market Nvidia has proven that uh companies like Google and Amazon are jumping in they don't want to get left behind and there's attempts at Acquisitions like we saw previously with Nvidia attempting to acquire arm uh that indicate a potential future of a consolidation like we see in most Industries where if you can't beat your competitors or if you're concerned about them just buy them make them go away or become part of your outfit so it's a really interesting territory right now that will affect consumers uh whether again that's in our actual diypc space or just in daily life as users of all this stuff indirectly but anyway Intel's announcements do appear to point toward an attempt at fighting for second place and that is what we think most of these companies are going to be doing right now whether or not they say that they want to establish themselves as the other one with Nvidia being the primary and then eventually probably fight for that primary spot so that's it for this one really interesting space right now as always thanks for watching we'll have our consumer Hardware news coming up then we also have a bunch of reviews coming up so just finished working on some cases uh we've got ITX and ATX in the pipe for some new reviews some coolers are getting written and filmed in the next couple days really exciting with all the things we have lined up now so check back for all that as always subscribe more check out our interviews recently too we did a number of them with different companies and that's all for this one thanks for watching we'll see you you all next time

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 427,141

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, intel ai, intel gaudi 3, intel ai 2024, nvidia vs intel ai, intel vs h100, h100 alternative, nvidia h100 alternative, intel xeon 6, nvidia blackwell, nvidia gb100, nvidia h100

Id: b7V92lQMaH8

Length: 25min 29sec (1529 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 12 2024