Under the leadership of Pat Gelsinger, Intel tried to compete against Nvidia and AMD in the AI market with its Gaudi series of GPUs. However, with little in the way of sales, it looked like the chip giant would just give up. It turns out that this is not the case, because it’s trying again, this time targeting the world of inference instead.
That’s according to a report by the Financial Times, which spoke with Kevork Kechichian, Intel’s general manager of its data centre group. At this year’s Computex event, Crescent Island was given some more details on top of those given in last year’s announcement, but the general gist of it all is that it has a very different approach to the whole machine learning shebang than Intel’s previous attempt, Gaudi.
Marketed as AI accelerators, the previous GPUs looked good on paper and were apparently being sold at an enticing price, but Nvidia’s dominance of the AI training market with its Hopper and Blackwell chips led to somewhat underwhelming sales of Gaudi. So much so that Intel cancelled its successor, Falcon Shores.
Now it’s trying again with Crescent Island (via Tom’s Hardware), and once again, everything looks great on paper. However, Intel is being far more savvy with this new GPU, in that rather than tackling Nvidia and AMD head-on, it’s looking at picking up sales for data centers that handle AI inference. Such systems run models that have already been trained; essentially, they’re just processing questions and tasks that users are demanding of the model.
Because of this, Crescent Island GPUs don’t need to have copious amounts of super-expensive High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), and they can be simply air-cooled, rather than using complex and costly liquid systems. If the AI chip market shifts significantly towards inference, then it might help to relieve the global memory crisis somewhat, because it uses cheaper LPDDR5X memory.
Nvidia is also targeting inference and has teamed up with Groq (note: not Grok) to produce a new chip that blends a language accelerator with its Rubin platform.
The question is, who will get to market first? None of the big three chip giants has given any kind of official launch date for their AI inference products, with Intel just generally hinting at some point later this year. If you’ve been holding off on a gaming PC upgrade for an end to the RAMpocalypse, I’m afraid that ray of sunshine isn’t likely to be seen for a good while yet.
