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Intel has provided a few new details about the AI computing chips it plans to release in 2025, according to Reuters.
The chip giant announced the “Falcon Shores” line—intended to steal market share from Nvidia, which currently dominates AI hardware, and compete on a more even footing with Advanced Micro Devices. Reuters reported that Intel shared the details at the ISC 2023 conference in Germany.
Barron’s separately reported that Intel claimed Falcon Shores outperforms comparable models from both competitors in some benchmarks. Intel originally intended the new line to have both GPU and CPU cores, but revamped the design to be GPU-only earlier this year, meaning it wouldn’t hit the market as originally scheduled in 2024. Tom’s Hardware reported Falcon Shores will have Compute Express Link (CXL) support as a “key differentiator,” albeit one that may put it at a disadvantage in certain workloads vs. Nvidia- and AMD-developed custom CPU+GPU designs.
Jeff McVeigh, corporate VP of Intel’s Super Compute Group, said the pivot to a GPU-only design will allow Intel customers to mix and match components to maximize performance rather than be locked into Intel CPUs. (As Tom’s Hardware noted, Intel had already planned on offering CPU- and GPU-only Falcon Shores variants before ditching the CPU option.)
“While we aspire to have the best CPU and the best GPU in the market, it was hard to say that one vendor at one time was going to have the best combination of those,” McVeigh told Reuters. “If you have discrete offerings, that allows you at the platform level to choose both between the ratio as well as the vendors.”
Intel has suffered a rough couple of years, but MarketWatch recently reported investors hope shares have finished bottoming out as CEO Pat Gelsinger continues to transform the firm into a foundry for other chipmakers. Shares in the company rebounded at the end of March after Executive Vice President Sandra Rivera said its power efficiency-focused line of Sierra Forest cloud computing chips will arrive ahead of schedule in 2024, but remain down more than 50% from April 2021.