Intel CPUs: the best defense is a good offense!

Intel's new CEO, Pat Gelsinger, remains calm in the face of Nvidia and its other competitors. Nvidia has announced its CPU to conquer the data center and supercomputer market. This processor is 10 times faster than its competitors in the field of Artificial Intelligence. The competition is currently fierce. After Apple's M1 CPU and AMD's EPYC, Nvidia has just released its Grace CPU. Pat Gelsinger remains confident and posted a message on his social media: "Attack!"

What is the Nvidia Grace CPU?

Nvidia has unveiled its ARM processor for data centers. It is named "Grace" in honor of 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 U.S. Navy who designed the first A-0 System compiler in 1951 and the COBOL programming language in 1959.

The CPU is not intended for laptops and desktops, but rather for data centers and servers requiring 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 new processor is expected to offer 10 times the computing power of the fastest servers currently available and is capable of handling demanding and complex Artificial Intelligence workloads, such as natural language processing.

What are the specific features of the Nvidia Grace 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 with LPDDR5x and ECC correction. The chip will feature an NVLink interconnect running at 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 new generation called Nvidia Grace Next will be available in 2025. The Swiss National Supercomputing Center (CSCS) and the Los Alamos National Laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy are already among the first to adopt this CPU for American scientific research. With the help of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, they will build supercomputers using the Nvidia Grace CPU.

Professor Thomas Schulthess, director of the CSCS, expressed his delight at making the new Grace processor available to users for processing and analyzing large and complex scientific datasets. Thom Mason, director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, stated that advanced research involving 3D simulations with enormous amounts of data would be possible with the Grace CPU. Simon Segars, CEO of Arm, added that the collaboration with Nvidia further supports the incredible work of scientists and researchers worldwide in the field of AI. Thus, in addition to Nvidia's existing business areas of GPUs and DPUs, the company is entering the CPU with this announcement. Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, clarified that, with the company's three core business areas, Grace will truly have the capacity to advance artificial intelligence.

Intel is going on the offensive!

Faced with its competitors, Intel aims to strengthen its leading position in the CPU . Intel's new CEO, Pat Gelsinger, also intends to expand into the automotive sector. This CEO is taking advantage of President Biden's policy of bringing technology production in-house. Various tensions with China and supply problems with electronic and computer components, exacerbated by the global pandemic, have led the United States to rethink its offshoring and outsourcing policies. Intel and other semiconductor manufacturers are therefore seeking tax breaks in exchange for local investment and are lobbying the President and Congress. Following a meeting at the White House, a desire to increasingly in-house production emerged. Currently, 12% of semiconductors are produced in the United States. Their goal is to increase this figure to 30-35%.

Just as Intel was encroaching on Nvidia's territory in the GPU sector with the launch of its Xe HPC processors, Nvidia, for its part, launched Grace to capture market share in the datacenter CPU and Artificial Intelligence market. Nvidia thus positioned itself as a serious competitor to Intel and AMD's Xeons and EPYC processors.

Intel's CEO is attacking and counter-attacking. According to him, the launch of the Habana product line in partnership with Amazon demonstrates Intel's prominence in the Artificial Intelligence market. Furthermore, the announcement of Xeon Ice Lake this April received a fairly positive response.

Focus on the recently released Xeon Ice Lake!

A few weeks after AMD launched its EPYC Milan 7003, Intel released its 10nm Xeon Ice Lake processor with features dedicated to Artificial Intelligence and security. Like the Xeon Platinum 8380, this processor has 40 cores and 80 threads, and operates at 2.3 GHz. Intel made a significant leap forward, as the previous generation had 28 cores and 56 threads. With this third ^generation , Intel moved from a 14nm to a 10nm manufacturing process. A performance improvement of approximately 46% is therefore expected in data centers for processing workloads. New servers equipped with this processor will be 2.65 times faster than older servers. This new system supports up to 6TB of memory with 8 channels of DDR4-3200 RAM and 64 PCIe Gen 4 ^slots per socket. The new Xeon Platinum 8380 has an MSRP price of $8,099.

The range is divided into 4 series: Platinum (8300), Gold (6300, 5300) and Silver (4300). For a Xeon Silver 4309 with 8 cores, the MSRP would be $501.

Intel puts pressure on Nvidia with Habana!

Intel's acquisition of Habana last December for approximately $2 billion is beginning to bear fruit. With AWS (Amazon Web Services) as a client, Intel is becoming a serious competitor to Nvidia in the cloud datacenter market. Eitan Medina, Habana's Chief Commercial Officer, confirms that even though they started from scratch and Nvidia has 100% market share, having AWS in their client portfolio is a crucial step in establishing their reputation in this sector.

In short, despite increasingly fierce competition – Nvidia with its Grace CPU, AMD with EPYC, Apple with its M1 – Intel remains confident and is fighting back! It is counting, among other things, on its Xeon Ice Lake and Habana processors to strengthen its market position.