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Intel names Stability AI as a major customer for Gaudi2 AI accelerator
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Intel is largely competing with Nvidia in the AI field
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The company bought into the AI accelerator market with the purchase of Habana Labs in 2019 for $2 billion
Intel’s focus at its Innovation Days event this week was majorly on artificial intelligence (AI). The industry is undergoing “a generational shift in AI,” said Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger introducing the theme right at the start of the event. He called AI a “superpower.”
During this week's event, Gelsinger noted that there is an AI roadmap at Intel, with Gaudi2 in 2023, Gaudi3 in 2024, and Falcon Shores in 2025. “That’s where we bring together Gaudi with our GPU capabilities into a single platform,” Gelsinger said.
GPU originally stood for graphics processing unit, but this technology is now used by Intel, Nvidia and others for image and video processing in AI applications.
Intel gave itself a leg-up on its AI journey buying Habana Labs in December 2019 for $2 billion. In May 2022, it introduced the Gaudi2 AI accelerator, which like rival Nvidia’s AI chips needs to be coupled with a CPU, according to analyst Jack Gold of J Gold Associates.
Gelsinger said that Stability AI is using 4,000 Gaudi2 accelerators, along with multiple Xeon processors to build one of the top 15 AI supercomputers in the world. Alibaba is using Intel Xeon processors in its AI cloud applications. Gelsinger said that Dell will also sell Gaudi accelerators for AI applications.
“Gaudi is indeed meant to compete with Nvidia, but at this point it’s probably more a competitor to the A100 than the H100,” Gold told Silverlinings. “Future versions of Gaudi will be more competitive higher up the compute stack.”
“From a sheer numbers perspective I assume Nvidia has multiple orders of magnitude more customers at this point, but it’s hard to access exactly what the numbers of users are given that most are using the device at the hyperscalers rather than deploying internally,” the analyst commented.
Gold said that he does expect the use of Gaudi to grow now that the accelerator is on its second generation and has a roadmap.