Intel officially unveils the Gaudi 3 accelerator at its Vision 2024 event. This is a powerful chip designed for training AI models. Intel lets Gaudi 3 compete directly against the Nvidia H100.

At its Vision 2024 event, Intel will present the Gaudi 3 accelerator, after the chip specialist had previously only revealed details sparingly. Gaudi 3 is a direct competitor to the Nvidia H100. “With Llama 2 with seven and thirteen billion parameters and GPT-3 with 175 billion parameters, the chip will train on average 50 percent faster,” Intel says. “Gaudi 3’s inference throughput will be 50 percent higher and consumption-based inference efficiency will be 40 percent better.”

Competition, but not with Blackwell

These claims tell us two important things: First, Intel is competing directly with Nvidia. The intent is clearly to provide a more powerful alternative to Nvidia’s most popular chip. This means that Intel also competes with AMD’s Instinct MI300 series. Higher efficiency and better performance are a plus, but so is availability: Nvidia can’t meet demand for its accelerators, so a worthy alternative from Intel is likely to hit the market.

Second, Intel is a whole generation behind Nvidia. In March, Nvidia announced Blackwell, the successor to the Hopper H100 accelerator. The Nvidia B100 should be about twice as powerful as the H100 and will at least easily outperform Gaudi 3 on paper.

Specifications

Gaudi 3 is equipped with a fifth generation of Tensor cores and has 64 on board, spread across two chiplets. The accelerator has a shared cache of 96 MB. The computing cores are surrounded by HBM2e with a capacity of up to 128 GB. The software for the chip is optimized for Hugging Face models and the PyTorch framework. A PCIe variant of Gaudi 3 is released.

It is noteworthy that Intel does not build the Gaudi 3 accelerator itself. Team Gelsinger relies on TSMC’s 5nm production capacity. Since TSMC’s capacity is fully booked, the question arises as to whether Intel can have a sufficiently large impact on the overall availability of high-performance accelerators worldwide with Gaudi 3.

Intel will make Gaudi 3 available to manufacturers such as Dell, HPE, Lenovo and Supermicro starting in the second quarter of this year.