Intel's new CEO Pat Gelsinger remains calm in the face of Nvidia and its other competitors. Nvidia announced its CPU to conquer the data center and supercomputer domain. This processor is 10 times faster than its competitors in the field of Artificial Intelligence. 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 released a message on his social networks: “Attack!”
What is the Nvidia Grace CPU?
Nvidia presented its ARM processor for data centers to the public. It is named “Grace” in homage to Grace Hopper, the pioneer of American computer programming. Grace Hopper was born on December 9, 1906 in New York and died on January 1, 1992. She was a computer scientist in the United States Navy and designer of the first A-0 System compiler in 1951 and the COBOL language in 1959.
The CPU is not intended for laptops and desktop computers, 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 ARM architecture. This new processor should offer 10 times more computing power than the fastest servers available and is capable of processing high and complex Artificial Intelligence workloads, including natural language processing.
What are the particularities of the Grace Nvidia CPU?
For the Grace CPU, NVIDIA has implemented ARM Neoverse cores with high-performance, low-consumption memory. It will have a bandwidth of 500 GB/s in LPDDR5x with ECC correction. The chip will be equipped with an NVLink interconnect running at 900 GB/s for the CPU-GPU and 600 GB/s for the 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 Los Alamos National Laboratory of the US Department of Energy are already the first to adopt 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 data sets. Thom Mason, director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, said that very advanced research with 3D simulations with a huge amount 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 around the world in the field of AI. So, in addition to Nvidia's business areas: GPU and DPU, it is entering the CPU area with this announcement. Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, specifies that with its 3 areas of activity of the Company, Grace will really have the capacity to advance artificial intelligence.
Intel is on the attack!
Faced with its competitors, Intel intends to strengthen its leading position in the CPU . 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 of internalizing technological production. The various tensions with China and the supply problems of electronic and IT components accentuated by the global pandemic are causing the United States to rethink its relocation and outsourcing policy. electronic chip manufacturers therefore intend to obtain tax advantages in return for local investments and are putting pressure on the Presidency and Congress. Following a meeting at the White House, a desire to internalize more and more production emerged. Currently, 12% of semiconductors are produced in the United States. The goal they had set would be to increase this figure to around 30 – 35%.
At a time when Intel is invading Nvidia's field in the GPU sector by launching the Xe HPC, Ponte Vecchio, Nvidia for its part is launching Grace to acquire its market share in the field of data center CPUs and Artificial Intelligence . Nvidia is therefore positioning itself as a serious competitor to Intel with AMD's Xeons and EPYC.
Intel CEO attacks and counterattacks. According to him, the launch of the Habana product range in partnership with Amazon demonstrates Intel's notoriety in the Artificial Intelligence market. Additionally, the announcement of Xeon Ice Lake this April received quite positive responses.
Focus on the recently released Xeon Ice Lake!
A few weeks after the launch of AMD's EPYC Milan 7003, Intel is launching its Xeon Ice Lake processor engraved at 10 nm 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 3rd generation , Intel is moving from a 14 nm to 10 nm engraving system. A performance improvement of around 46% is therefore expected in data centers when processing workloads. New servers equipped with this processor will therefore be 2.65 times faster than old servers. This new system supports memory up to 6 TB with 8 channels of DDR4-3200 RAM and 64 PCIe 4th generation per socket. The new Xeon Platinum 8380 carries an MSRP 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 price would be $501.
Intel puts pressure on Nvidia with Habana!
Intel's purchase of Habana last December for around $2 billion has started to pay off. Indeed, with AWS (Amazon web service) as a client, Intel is becoming a serious competitor to Nvidia in the Cloud Datacenter. Eitan Medina, Commercial Director of Habana confirms that even if they are starting from 0% and Nvidia is at 100%, having AWS in their customer portfolio is a very important step to anchor their notoriety in this area.
In short, despite the competition which is becoming increasingly tough: Nvidia with its Grace CPU, AMD with EPYC, Apple with its M1, Intel remains confident and counterattacks! It is counting, among other things, on its Xeon Ice Lake and Habana to strengthen its commercial positions.
