Intel launches Gaudi 3

Intel this week introduced the Gaudi 3 accelerator, promising openness and choice in enterprise generative artificial intelligence (GenAI).

At the Intel Vision 2024 customer and partner conference in Phoenix, Arizona, it also unveiled a suite of new open scalable systems, next-gen products and strategic collaborations to accelerate GenAI adoption. With only 10% of enterprises successfully moving GenAI projects into production last year, Intel says, its latest offerings address the challenges businesses face in scaling AI initiatives.

At the Intel Vision 2024 customer and partner conference, Intel introduced the Intel Gaudi 3 accelerator to bring performance, openness and choice to enterprise generative AI (GenAI), and unveiled a suite of new open scalable systems, next-gen products and strategic collaborations to accelerate GenAI adoption. With only 10% of enterprises successfully moving GenAI projects into production last year, Intel’s latest offerings address the challenges businesses face in scaling AI initiatives.

“Innovation is advancing at an unprecedented pace, all enabled by silicon – and every company is quickly becoming an AI company,” said Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger. “Intel is bringing AI everywhere across the enterprise, from the PC to the data centre to the edge. Our latest Gaudi, Xeon and Core Ultra platforms are delivering a cohesive set of flexible solutions tailored to meet the changing needs of our customers and partners and capitalise on the immense opportunities ahead.”

Enterprises are looking to scale GenAI from pilot to production. To do so, they need readily available solutions, built on performant and cost- and energy-efficient processors like the Intel Gaudi 3 AI accelerator, that also address complexity, fragmentation, data security and compliance requirements.

Introducing Gaudi 3 for AI Training and Inference

The Intel Gaudi 3 AI accelerator will power AI systems with up to tens of thousands of accelerators connected through the common standard of Ethernet. Intel Gaudi 3 promises 4x more AI compute for BF16 and a 1.5x increase in memory bandwidth over its predecessor. The accelerator will deliver a significant leap in AI training and inference for global enterprises looking to deploy GenAI at scale.

In comparison to the Nvidia H100, Intel Gaudi 3 is projected to deliver 50% faster time-to-train on average3 across Llama2 models with 7B and 13B parameters, and GPT-3 175B parameter model. Additionally, Intel Gaudi 3 accelerator inference throughput is projected to outperform the H100 by 50% on average and 40% for inference power-efficiency averaged across Llama 7B and 70B parameters, and Falcon 180B parameter models.

Intel Gaudi 3 provides open, community-based software and industry-standard Ethernet networking. And it allows enterprises to scale flexibly from a single node to clusters, super-clusters and mega-clusters with thousands of nodes, supporting inference, fine-tuning and training at the largest scale.

Intel Gaudi 3 will be available to OEMs – including Dell Technologies, HPE, Lenovo and Supermicro – in the second quarter of 2024.

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 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 behaviour 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