Intel has launched its Intel Xeon 6 processors with E-cores (Efficient-cores) and announced the pricing for its Gaudi 2 and 3 accelerator kits.
The announcements were made by the company’s CEO Pat Gelsinger during his keynote speech at the annual Computex event currently taking place in Taipei, Taiwan.
First previewed at MWC 2024 and available to customers from today (June 4), the Xeon 6 E-core, codenamed Sierra Forest, is built on the Intel 3 process based on the Intel 7 node and offers up to 288 E-cores per socket. The processors also deliver a 4.2x performance per rack improvement and 2.6x performance per watt improvement when compared to second-generation Intel Xeon processors.
Its P-cores (Performance-cores) counterpart, codenamed Granite Rapids, is expected to launch next quarter. Both E-cores and P-cores are built on a compatible architecture with a shared software stack and an open ecosystem of hardware and software vendors.
Gaudi pricing revealed
Gelsinger also used his Computex keynote to announce the pricing for Intel’s Gaudi AI accelerator kits.
First unveiled earlier this year at the company’s Vision 2024 conference, the latest generation of the product, the Gaudi 3, offers 1,835 teraflops of FP8 compute performance, 128GB of HBM2e, and 3.7TBps of HBM bandwidth across its OAM-compliant accelerator card.
The Universal Baseboard provides 14.6 petaflops of FP8 compute performance, more than 1TB of HBM2e, and 29.6 TBps of HBM bandwidth, while the PCIe CEM – a new offering exclusively for the Gaudi 3 – contains 1,835 teraflops of FP8 compute performance, 128GB of HBM2e, 600W of TDP.
Intel’s Gaudi 3 AI kit, which includes eight Gaudi 3 accelerators and a Universal Baseboard, is priced at $125,000. The company estimates this to be two-thirds of the cost of “comparable competitive platforms.”
Although it has not named these competitors, the company is likely referring to Nvidia and/or AMD.
However, in a statement, the company described Gaudi 3 as “the only MLPerf-benchmarked alternative to Nvidia H100 for training and inference of LLMs.”
The AI kit for the accelerator’s predecessor, Gaudi 2, is priced at $65,000 and is estimated by Intel to be one-third the cost of comparable, but again unnamed, competitive platforms. It also contains eight accelerators and a Universal Baseboard.
The 5nm Gaudi 3 accelerator offers 2x more AI FP8 compute power, 4x more AI compute for BF16, 2x network bandwidth, and a 1.5x increase in memory bandwidth when compared to the Gaudi 2.
“AI is driving one of the most consequential eras of innovation the industry has ever seen,” Gelsinger said during his keynote speech. “The magic of silicon is once again enabling exponential advancements in computing that will push the boundaries of human potential and power the global economy for years to come.”
He also claimed that Intel was “one of the only companies in the world innovating across the full spectrum of the AI market opportunity,” from its semiconductor manufacturing to PC, network, Edge, and data center systems.
