Gaudi 3 is finally coming to a server rack near you!
Today Intel showed off its Gaudi 3 accelerator and it seems I may have been right when I earlier speculated that Intel’s strategy for Gaudi 3 is ultimately going to be “we’re the low cost option“. Which is quite a strategy for Intel. If you don’t remember it was Intel in the past who was nickel and diming customers for their Xeon line of processors… to go from that to having to be the value, the Walmart, option is a change.
In fact it seems Intel is pricing its Gaudi 3 chips at half of what Nvidia is demanding for their extortionately priced H100. That is approximately $15,000 for Intel and approximately $30,000 for Nvidia. So a lot of money to the average person, but less money than the competition.
Only problem seems to be performance.
When it comes to performance, Intel says that Gaudi 3 can offer up to 1856 BF16/FP8 matrix TFLOPS as well as up to 28.7 BF16 vector TFLOPS at around 600W TDP. Compared to Nvidia’s H100, at least on paper, Gaudi 3 offers slightly lower BF16 matrix performance (1,856 vs 1,979 TFLOPS), two times lower FP8 matrix performance (1,856 vs 3,958 TFLOPS), and significantly lower BF16 vector performance (28.7 vs 1,979 TFLOPS).
It seems that Gaudi 3 might be up to challenging the H100 on a price / performance basis according to Intel but that is something that will have to be determined by real world use and not by Intel itself. However the future Blackwell processors are a significantly larger problem. Those suckers are more likely than not going to decimate Gaudi 3 in real world performance. I would hope so considering their cost.
Which again leads us to Intel’s “we’re the low cost option“. With Nvidia’s Blackwell costing a fortune Gaudi 3 may take some market share. I mean would you rather have two exquisite systems or one exquisite system and ten Gaudi 3s for less. That’s the kind of thinking I’m guessing we’ll see.
Oh and of course AMD is out there too… doing something.
Regardless it’s nice to see more options for AI applications than just Nvidia. We simply cannot allow the entire world to rely on one company or allow one company to demand ever higher prices. It’s not safe or sustainable.