Intel Brings Gaudi2 AI Accelerators To China As An Alternative To NVIDIA A800 Chips

wccftech.com:

Intel has announced that the company is bringing its Habana Gaudi2 accelerators for AI & HPC to the Chinese market.

The Habana Labs Gaudi2 accelerator was launched last year and the company claimed that the new chip offered training performance faster than the NVIDIA Ampere A100 GPU. The company even put out some internal performance estimates and stated that the Gaudi2 is the one & only alternative to NVIDIA GPUs for LLM Training. This was showcased within MLPerf benchmarks that showed up to a 69% gain in performance over the A100.

As the US seeks to tighten export controls on AI chips to China, Intel held a press conference in Beijing on the July 11, announcing the launch of the deep learning processor Habana Gaudi 2 in the Chinese market. This processor can be used to accelerate AI training and inference tasks. Chinese AI server giants, such as Inspur, New H3C, and xFusion, are expected to release server products featuring the Gaudi 2 processor.

via DigiTimes Asia

Intel has also joined hands with BCG to utilize the same Gaudi2 accelerators within Generative AI workloads. Considering how popular Generative AI has become within a year, this has raised the demand for GPUs that can handle AI well. NVIDIA is the undisputed leader within the AI segment but this has also caused supply issues across the globe. The massive demand for NVIDIA's GPUs that are capable of doing AI tasks has led to an opportunity that Intel and AMD want to take a slice from.

We just reported how a potential "Extended" chip ban on China can further increase the prices of the already super-expensive NVIDIA AI GPUs within the country. The GPUs cost more than what it costs to acquire them in the US and these aren't even the full variants. For China, NVIDIA