Crafting tomorrow's AI landscape

During the Intel Vision 2024 customer and partner conference, Intel unveiled its latest breakthrough: the Intel Gaudi 3 accelerator. This cutting-edge technology is designed to revolutionize enterprise generative AI (GenAI) by offering unparalleled performance, openness, and choice. Alongside the Gaudi 3, Intel introduced a suite of open scalable systems, next-gen products, and strategic collaborations aimed at driving the adoption of GenAI. With only a mere 10% of enterprises successfully transitioning GenAI projects into production last year, Intel's new offerings are poised to address the challenges hindering AI initiative scaling.

Pat Gelsinger, Intel's CEO, emphasized the company's commitment to democratizing AI across all facets of the enterprise landscape. He stated, "Innovation is advancing at an unprecedented pace, all enabled by silicon – and every company is quickly becoming an AI company." Gelsinger highlighted Intel's latest platforms – Gaudi, Xeon, and Core Ultra – as cohesive solutions tailored to meet evolving customer needs and seize emerging opportunities.

Enterprises seeking to scale GenAI from pilot to production require accessible solutions built on high-performance, cost-efficient processors. Intel Gaudi 3, the AI accelerator, promises to fulfill these requirements while addressing complexity, fragmentation, data security, and compliance needs.

The Intel Gaudi 3 AI accelerator is positioned to transform AI systems by enabling tens of thousands of accelerators connected via Ethernet, a common standard. It boasts 4x more AI compute power for BF16 and a 1.5x increase in memory bandwidth compared to its predecessor, promising significant advancements in AI training and inference for global enterprises.

In head-to-head comparisons with Nvidia H100, Intel Gaudi 3 projects a 50% faster time-to-train on average across various models and a 50% improvement in inference throughput, along with a 40% increase in power efficiency. Gaudi 3's open, community-based software and support for industry-standard Ethernet networking facilitate flexible scaling from single nodes to mega-clusters, accommodating inference, fine-tuning, and training at unprecedented scales.

Intel Gaudi 3 will be available to OEMs, including Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Lenovo, and Supermicro, in the second quarter of 2024, ushering in a new era of AI innovation and scalability.

Generating Value for Customers with Intel AI Solutions

Intel 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.

Intel shared broad momentum with enterprise customers and partners across industries to deploy Intel Gaudi accelerator solutions for new and innovative generative AI applications:

• NAVER: To develop a powerful large language model (LLM) for the deployment of advanced AI services globally, from cloud to on-device. NAVER has confirmed Intel Gaudi’s foundational capability in executing compute operations for large-scale transformer models with outstanding performance per watt.
• Bosch: To explore further opportunities for smart manufacturing, including foundational models generating synthetic datasets of manufacturing anomalies to provide robust, evenly-distributed training sets (e.g., automated optical inspection). 
• IBM: Using 5th Gen Intel® Xeon® processors for its watsonx.data™ data store and working closely with Intel to validate the watsonx™ platform for Intel Gaudi accelerators. 
• Ola/Krutrim: To pre-train and fine-tune its first India foundational model with generative capabilities in 10 languages, producing industry-leading price/performance versus market solutions. Krutrim is now pre-training a larger foundational model on an Intel® Gaudi® 2 cluster.
• NielsenIQ, an Advent International portfolio company: To enhance its GenAI capabilities by training domain-specific LLMs on the world’s largest consumer buying behavior database, enhancing its client service offerings while adhering to rigorous privacy standards.
• Seekr: Leader in trustworthy AI runs production workloads on Intel Gaudi 2, Intel® Data Center GPU Max Series and Intel® Xeon® processors in the Intel® Tiber™ Developer Cloud for LLM development and production deployment support.
• IFF: Global leader in food, beverage, scent and biosciences will leverage GenAI and digital twin technology to establish an integrated digital biology workflow for advanced enzyme design and fermentation process optimization.
• CtrlS Group: Collaborating to build an AI supercomputer for India-based customers and scaling CtrlS cloud services for India with additional Gaudi clusters.
• Bharti Airtel: Embracing the power of Intel’s cutting-edge technology, Airtel plans to leverage its rich telecom data to enhance its AI capabilities and turbo charge the experiences of its customers. The deployments will be in line with Airtel’s commitment to stay at the forefront of technological innovation and help drive new revenue streams in a rapidly evolving digital landscape.
• Landing AI: Fine-tuned domain-specific large vision model for use in segmenting cells and detecting cancer.
• Roboflow: Running production workloads of YOLOv5, YOLOv8, CLIP, SAM and ViT models for its end-to-end computer vision platform.
• Infosys: Global leader in next-generation digital services and consulting announced a strategic collaboration to bring Intel technologies including 4th and 5th Gen Intel Xeon processors, Intel Gaudi 2 AI accelerators and Intel® Core™ Ultra to Infosys Topaz – an AI-first set of services, solutions and platforms that accelerate business value using generative AI technologies.

Intel also announced collaborations with Google Cloud, Thales and Cohesity to leverage Intel's confidential computing capabilities in their cloud instances. This includes Intel® Trust Domain Extensions (Intel® TDX), Intel® Software Guard Extensions (Intel® SGX) and Intel’s attestation service. Customers can run their AI models and algorithms in a trusted execution environment (TEE) and leverage Intel’s trust services for independently verifying the trust worthiness of these TEEs.   

Ecosystem Rallies to Develop Open Platform for Enterprise AI

In collaboration with Anyscale, Articul8, DataStax, Domino, Hugging Face, KX Systems, MariaDB, MinIO, Qdrant, Red Hat, Redis, SAP, VMware, Yellowbrick and Zilliz, Intel announced the intention to create an open platform for enterprise AI. The industrywide effort aims to develop open, multivendor GenAI systems that deliver best-in-class ease-of-deployment, performance and value, enabled by retrieval-augmented generation. RAG enables enterprises’ vast, existing proprietary data sources running on standard cloud infrastructure to be augmented with open LLM capabilities, accelerating GenAI use in enterprises.

As initial steps in this effort, Intel will release reference implementations for GenAI pipelines on secure Intel Xeon and Gaudi-based solutions, publish a technical conceptual framework, and continue to add infrastructure capacity in the Intel Tiber Developer Cloud for ecosystem development and validation of RAG and future pipelines. Intel encourages further participation of the ecosystem to join forces in this open effort to facilitate enterprise adoption, broaden solution coverage and accelerate business results.

Intel's Expanded AI Roadmap and Open Ecosystem Approach

In addition to the Intel Gaudi 3 accelerator, Intel provided updates on its next-generation products and services across all segments of enterprise AI.

New Intel® Xeon® 6 Processors: Intel Xeon processors offer performance-efficient solutions to run current GenAI solutions, including RAG, that produce business-specific results using proprietary data. Intel introduced the new brand for its next-generation processors for data centers, cloud and edge: Intel Xeon 6. Intel Xeon 6 processors with new Efficient-cores (E-cores) will deliver exceptional efficiency and launch this quarter, while Intel Xeon 6 with Performance-cores (P-cores) will offer increased AI performance and launch soon after the E-core processors.

• Intel Xeon 6 processors with E-cores (code-named Sierra Forest):
  • 2.4x performance per watt improvement⁴ and 2.7x better rack density⁵ compared with 2nd Gen Intel® Xeon® processors.
  • Customers can replace older systems at a ratio of nearly 3-to-1, drastically lowering energy consumption and helping meet sustainability goals⁶.
• Intel Xeon 6 processors with P-cores (code-named Granite Rapids):
  • Incorporate software support for the MXFP4 data format, which reduces next token latency by up to 6.5x versus 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® processors using FP16, with the ability to run 70 billion parameter Llama-2 models⁷.

Client, Edge and Connectivity: Intel announced momentum for client and updates to its roadmap for edge and connectivity including:

• Intel® Core™ Ultra processors are powering new capabilities for productivity, security and content creation, providing a great motivation for businesses to refresh their PC fleets. Intel expects expect to ship 40 million AI PCs in 2024, with more than 230 designs, from ultra-thin PCs to handheld gaming devices.
• Next-generation Intel Core Ultra client processor family (code-named Lunar Lake), launching in 2024, will have more than 100 platform tera operations per second (TOPS) and more than 45 neural processing unit (NPU) TOPS for next-generation AI PCs.
• Intel announced new edge silicon across the Intel Core Ultra, Intel® Core™ and Intel® Atom processor and Intel® Arc™ graphics processing unit (GPU) families of products, targeting key markets including retail, industrial manufacturing and healthcare. All new additions to Intel’s edge AI portfolio will be available this quarter and will be supported by the Intel® Tiber™ Edge Platform this year.
• Through the Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC), Intel is leading open Ethernet networking for AI fabrics, introducing an array of AI-optimized Ethernet solutions. Designed to transform large scale-up and scale-out AI fabrics, these innovations enable training and inferencing for increasingly vast models, with sizes expanding by an order of magnitude in each generation. The lineup includes the Intel AI NIC, AI connectivity chiplets for integration into XPUs, Gaudi-based systems, and a range of soft and hard reference AI interconnect designs for Intel Foundry.

Intel Tiber Portfolio of Business Solutions

Intel unveiled the Intel® Tiber™ portfolio of business solutions to streamline the deployment of enterprise software and services, including for GenAI.

A unified experience makes it easier for enterprise customers and developers to find solutions that fit their needs, accelerate innovation and unlock value without compromising on security, compliance or performance. Customers can begin exploring the Intel Tiber portfolio starting today, with a full rollout planned for the third quarter of 2024. Learn more at Intel Tiber website.

Intel's announcements at Vision 2024 underscore the company's commitment to making AI accessible, open and secure for enterprises worldwide. With these new solutions and collaborations, Intel is poised to lead the way in the AI revolution, unlocking unprecedented value for businesses everywhere.