NVIDIA has cashed in on the AI rush, leaving Intel scrambling for the second place. However, when compared to its closest competitor AMD, Intel finds itself in a difficult position. After shuttering its server business earlier this year, team blue recently shut its mini PC business as well. 

According to reports, Intel has ceased investment in its NUC (Next Unit of Computing) line of mini PC products. These small form factor NUC PCs saw use all over the enterprise sector, but Intel has now handed them over to its manufacturing partners. This move is in line with Intel’s bid to concentrate their resources on finding a foothold into the exploding AI compute market. 

Since its acquisition of AI chipmaker Habana Labs in 2019 for $2 billion, Intel has tried hard to break into the AI compute market. As NVIDIA’s software moat grows stronger, Intel is left with an ever-shrinking market share. Will redoubling its efforts into AI hardware give it the boost it needs?

Going up against a giant

While backing out of the mini PC market is mainly driven by a reluctance to compete with its OEMs, it also comes at a time when the company is cutting costs across the board. Intel has also targeted $10 billion in cost cutting for 2023 as a part of the IDM 2.0 strategy which it adopted in 2021. Reportedly, even the server business was sold in a bid to focus on its new strategy. 

This strategy doesn’t seem to be working for the company, as Intel’s stock has dipped heavily, dropping 69% of its value from a high in 2021. While its competitors AMD and NVIDIA saw huge growth in the same time period due to the boom in AI applications, Intel’s AI offerings have fallen to the wayside. Even comments from Intel’s management echo this sentiment. Eitan Medina, Habana’s chief business officer, said in 2020, “We have to realise that we’re starting from zero and NVIDIA is 100%. The uphill battle or the process of taking market share has to go through convincing end developers to try it out.”

Even as the company is fighting an uphill battle against the green giant, its hardware seems to be doing well against NVIDIA’s lineup. When testing the Habana Gaudi 2 accelerator against NVIDIA’s A100 chips, researchers at Hugging Face found that Intel’s offerings beat out NVIDIA’s chips in common AI workloads. In a gauntlet that tested the chips’ BERT pre-training, text-to-image on Stable Diffusion, and fine-tuning T5-3B, Habana was upto 2.8x faster than NVIDIA A100 in these workloads. 

Even with this performance bump, Habana chips are facing the heat against NVIDIA’s Grace Hopper chips. This new line thoroughly beats Intel’s AI accelerators while ironically using Intel Xeon CPUs to do so. However, Habana is still capable enough to compete in the industry, hardware-wise. Regardless, Intel falls short in an important facet of AI compute: software. Intel’s One API offering works well for basic AI workloads, but NVIDIA’s software stack services nine different verticals, from enterprise AI to Omniverse. 

Strategic realignment needed

As part of the cost-cutting measures, Intel has also moved towards a disaggregated CPU architecture. First seen with the much-delayed Meteor Lake line of chips, Intel has moved to a chiplet design to not only cut down on manufacturing costs, but to better compete with its peers. 

Using the AI accelerator know-how from Habana, Intel has been slowly eating up the on-device AI compute market. While Gaudi is competing with NVIDIA’s heaviest cards like Grace Hopper and the H100, the new Meteor Lake chips will compete with NVIDIA GPUs in laptops. Intel’s integrated offerings will offer a low-power alternative to NVIDIA’s more power-hungry GPUs in everyday laptops, a strategy that has already seen moderate success in Apple’s M-series chips. 

At a glance, this market seems to be a better field to approach NVIDIA from, especially in terms of building the software stack. Let’s take CUDA for example, which was built over decades through constant feedback by developers who used NVIDIA’s chips as accelerators. While Intel doesn’t have as big a timeframe, shipping AI chips on laptops can vastly expedite the creation of a robust software stack. 

The third generation of Gaudi chips is on the horizon, and will take on competing offerings from other specialised chipmakers like Graphcore, SambaNova, Tenstorrent, and Cerebras. While NVIDIA continues to enjoy its market dominance thanks to its strong software stack, it seems that Intel will slowly build up momentum as AI accelerators begin to become cheaper to manufacture for Team Blue. 

Combined with its strategy of ‘innovate and integrate’, Intel could soon start offering end-to-end AI solutions which include CPUs, GPUs, and AI accelerators. When combined with a software stack, this might finally make Intel relevant as a third player in the market alongside NVIDIA and AMD.