Certainly, Intel is sorting out its AI strategy by investing in AI accelerators and expanding on its existing customers. One can say, apart from AMD building the whole architecture, none of the OEM providers can build a PC, or AI PC, without utilising the blue-chip company’s CPU.

But talking about the AI strategy again, is Intel in denial? In a recent interview, Patrick Gelsinger, the CEO of Intel, confirmed that the company was on track with its investment, when it comes to AI. Even though the demand for its Gaudi accelerators are rising, it is minuscule compared to AMD and NVIDIA’s GPUS.

Gaudi is on track for around 500 million of sales in 2024. This is several times less than AMD’s MI300X’s demand for $3.5 billion and the NVIDIA’s H100 and H200’s $40 billion demand. When probed on this, Gelsinger said Intel’s Vision 2024 event saw the announcement of 20+ customers for its AI accelerator, which highlights the company’s strength.

Is the CPU approach for AI viable?

“We’re really starting to see that pipeline of activity convert,” said Gelsinger. Some say that Intel is completely living in denial with its current AI strategy. One of the biggest reasons for this is that Intel has always been the biggest proponent of pushing CPUs for AI workloads. 

But Intel’s biggest bet is on edge use cases, which is through its Core mobile processors and Xeon processors. With smaller language models increasing in the AI space, these mobile processors are currently in the perfect space. While NVIDIA is also delivering this with Arm-based processors on mobile devices, these are still incapable of running on laptops without an Intel CPU.

Recently, a team of researchers at Hugging Face published a blog that said they were able to train an LLM based on Microsoft Phi-2 model on Intel Meteor Lake, which is now renamed to Core Ultra, specifically built for high performance laptops consisting of 16 cores. The interesting part is that it comes with an integrated GPU, called iGPU with 16 Xe Vector Engines. 

Moreover, Intel’s introduction of the Neural Processing Unit (NPU) marks a significant milestone for its architectures. This dedicated AI engine is tailored for efficient client AI, allowing it to handle demanding AI computations with greater efficiency compared to using the main CPU or integrated graphics (iGPU). 

By offloading AI tasks to the NPU, users can free up the main CPU and graphics for other tasks, resulting in improved power efficiency.

The blog ends with: “Thanks to Hugging Face and Intel, you can now run LLMs on your laptop, enjoying the many benefits of local inference, like privacy, low latency, and low cost.” This is what Intel is aiming for as well. 

Furthermore, when it comes to India, Intel has a buzzing partner ecosystem with Infosys, Bharti Airtel, Ola Krutrim, Zoho, and L&T announcing partnerships with the company. Intel is betting big on India, which is not that new. Providing cheaper alternatives when it comes to data centres and powering enterprise solutions, Intel has always been the go to choice for Indian companies.

“AI does not just require big GPUs to solve the problem. There are a lot of different models that can run on Xeon. Innovation at scale can happen with Xeon. We are working with several large customers. Gaudi 2 is available, Gaudi 3 comes in the second half. You will see some of those products coming into India through these customers as well,” said Santosh Viswanathan, VP and MD of Intel in India. 

Ushering the era of AI PCs

One can even say that Intel is living in the future when it comes to building AI PCs. Though Jensen Huang, the NVIDIA chief, has said that everyone would be a gamer in the future using their GPUs, Intel’s approach towards building AI PCs makes a lot of sense as well. 

Intel also has a bunch of partnerships for its AI PC goals. At the AI Everywhere event in December, Gelsinger and his team announced the launch of Intel Core Ultra and Intel Arc GPUs for pushing the goal of making every PC in the world an AI PC. 

This would be achieved through its partnership with Dell, Lenovo, HP, Supermicro, and Microsoft, for bringing the hardware onto their devices. This was further solidified at the Intel Vision event in April.

Intel anticipates shipping 40 million AI PCs in 2024, featuring over 230 designs spanning from ultra-thin PCs to handheld gaming devices.

Looking ahead, Intel’s roadmap includes the launch of the next-generation Intel Core Ultra client processor family, codenamed Lunar Lake, in 2024. This lineup is projected to deliver more than 100 platform tera operations per second (TOPS) and over 45 neural processing unit (NPU) TOPS, ushering in a new era of AI-centric computing.

The rivalry between Intel and NVIDIA, encompassing both CPUs and GPUs, is poised to intensify, potentially reshaping the landscape of AI and HPC. It’s widely believed that Intel is the best CPU to buy, and NVIDIA, the best GPU to buy. 

But this might take a turn soon given that the conversation about computing has almost shifted around AI. There are no PCs without Intel – that’s for sure.