Intel’s new CEO, Pat Gelsinger, remains calm about Nvidia and its other competitors. Nvidia announced it Processor Nvidia Grace to conquer the space of data centers and supercomputers. This processor is 10 times faster than its competitors in the field of Artificial Intelligence. The competition is raging right now. After Apple’s M1 CPU, AMD’s EPYC, Nvidia has just released its Grace CPU. Pat Gelsinger remains confident on his side and posted a message on his social networks: “Attack!”
What is Nvidia Grace CPU?
Nvidia has unveiled its ARM processor for data centers. It is named “Grace” as a tribute to Grace Hopper, the pioneer of American computer programming. Grace Hopper was born on December 9, 1906 in New York City and died on January 1, 1992. She was a computer scientist in the United States Navy and the designer of the first A-0 system compiler in 1951 and the COBOL language in 1959.
The Processor Grace is not intended for laptops and desktops, but for data centers and servers that require high computing power in the field of Artificial Intelligence. During the GTC 2021 Keynote, NVIDIA announced this first CPU based on the ARM architecture. This news processor it is expected to offer 10 times more computing power than the fastest servers available and is able to handle high and complex AI workloads, including natural language processing.
What are the specifics of Grace Nvidia CPU?
For the Grace CPU, NVIDIA has implemented ARM Neoverse cores with high-performance, low-power memory. It will have a bandwidth of 500 GB/s in LPDDR5x with ECC correction. There potato chip it will be equipped with an NVLink interface with a speed of 900 GB/s for CPU-GPU and 600 GB/s for CPU-CPU. Grace can process NLP models with over 1 billion parameters. This Grace CPU will be released in 2023, and a generation called Nvidia Grace Next will be available in 2025. The Swiss National Supercomputing Center (CSCS) and the US Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory are already early adopters of this CPU for research American scientists. With the help of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, they will build supercomputers with the Nvidia Grace CPU.
Professor Thomas Schulthess, Director of CSCS, says he is delighted to make the new Grace processor available to its users for the processing and analysis of large and complex scientific datasets. Thom Mason, director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, said that very advanced research with 3D simulations with huge amounts of data would be possible with the Grace CPU. Simon Segars, CEO of Arm added that the partnership with Nvidia further supports the incredible work of scientists and researchers around the world in the field of artificial intelligence. So, in addition to Nvidia’s fields of activity: GPU and DPU, it also enters its field Processor with this announcement. Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, clarifies that with the Company’s 3 business areas, Grace will truly have the ability to advance artificial intelligence.
Intel on the attack!
Faced with its competitors, Intel intends to strengthen its position as the market leader for Processor. Intel’s new CEO, Pat Gelsinger, also plans to move into the automotive sector. This Intel CEO is taking advantage of new President Biden’s policy to internalize tech production. Various tensions with China and supply problems for electronic and IT components highlighted by the global pandemic are forcing the United States to review its relocation and outsourcing policy. Intel and its manufacturers electronic chips As such, they intend to obtain tax advantages in exchange for local investment and are lobbying the Presidency and Congress. After a meeting at the White House, there was a desire to internalize more and more production. Currently, 12% of semiconductors are produced in the United States. The goal they had set would be to increase this percentage to around 30 – 35%.
At a time when Intel is encroaching on Nvidia in the GPU sector by launching Xe HPC, Ponte Vecchio, Nvidia for its part is launching Grace to gain market share in the data center CPU sector and Artificial Intelligence. So Nvidia is positioning itself as a serious competitor to Intel with AMD’s Xeons and EPYC.
Intel’s CEO attacks and fights back. According to him, the launch of the Habana product line in collaboration with Amazon demonstrates Intel’s reputation in the Artificial Intelligence market. Additionally, the announcement of Xeon Ice Lake in April received quite positive responses.
Focus on the newly released Xeon Ice Lake!
A few weeks after the launch of AMD’s EPYC Milan 7003, Intel is launching the Xeon Ice Lake processor etched at 10nm with features dedicated to Artificial Intelligence and security. Like the Xeon Platinum 8380, the latter has 40 cores and 80 threads. It operates at 2.3 GHz. Intel hit hard because the previous generation had 28 cores and 56 threads. With this 3m generation, Intel is moving from a 14nm etch system to 10nm. Therefore, around 46% performance improvement is expected in data centers when processing workloads. New servers are equipped with this processor it will therefore be 2.65 times faster than the old servers. This new system supports up to 6 TB of memory with 8 channels of DDR4-3200 RAM and 64 PCIe 4m outlet production. The new Xeon Platinum 8380 carries an MSRP of $8,099.
The series is divided into 4 series: Platinum (8300), Gold (6300, 5300) and Silver (4300). For a Xeon Silver 4309 with 8 cores, the MSRP price would be $501.
Intel pushes Nvidia with Habana!
Intel’s purchase of Habana last December for about $2 billion has begun to bear fruit. Indeed, with AWS (Amazon web service) as a customer, Intel becomes a serious competitor to Nvidia in the Cloud Datacenter. Eitan Medina, Commercial Director of Habana confirms that even if they start from 0% and Nvidia is at 100%, having AWS in the customer portfolio is a very important step to establish their reputation in this area.
In short, despite the increasingly tough competition: Nvidia with its Grace CPU, AMD with its EPYC, Apple with its M1, Intel remains confident and fights back! It relies, among others, on the Xeon Ice Lake and Habana to strengthen its trading positions.
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