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Intel invested $40 million to spin-out its enterprise generative AI company Articul8
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As AI moves from high-end graphics-heavy workloads, there is an opportunity for Intel to compete with Nvidia, according to a recent research note from J.Gold Associates
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Many enterprises do not need expensive GPUs for enterprise AI workloads
Intel is preparing to battle artificial intelligence (AI) top dog Nvidia as well as other AI rivals with a broad-based approach to the technology in 2024, deploying it from the PC to the data center.
The chipmaker has most recently invested $40 million to spin-out its enterprise generative AI company Articul8 with DigitalBridge and GiantLeap Capital. The startup is led by CEO Arun Subramaniyan, who formerly headed up the data center and AI cloud execution and strategy team at Intel.
As J.Gold Associates analyst Jack Gold said in a recent research note Intel’s strength in this growing market comes from the amount of AI sectors it covers in the silicon realm, from PCs to data center, cloud and hyperscaler infrastructure. Several other companies are deep in the AI business but few serve as many areas.
“This broad based approach to AI is probably one of the most important strategy statements that Intel has made in a long time, as the market for AI is expanding dramatically,” Gold wrote. “With an across the compute spectrum presence, Intel is showing its inherent strength compared to companies offering solutions to only one aspect of the AI processing continuum.”
As Silverlinings has noted before, many enterprises do not need expensive GPUs for enterprise AI workloads such as Inference for retail positioning tasks. This is particularly true as neural processing unit (NPU) accelerators that handle machine learning algorithms are being used with both CPUs and GPUs, to deal with AI tasks.
“With Intel committed to shipping over 100M processors for the PC in the next few years, it's expected to power AI in 80% of all PCs,” Gold noted. “Just as we went from CPU alone, to integrated GPU on chip, nearly all processors going forward will include a NPU AI Accelerator built in. It's the new battleground and enabler for advanced functions that will change many aspects of software apps
The analyst said it is shaping up to be a battle between AMD and Intel over who will power the next generation of AI-enabled PCs, with Intel currently out ahead. “Core Ultra is available now in consumer PCs, and next quarter in Commercial PCs, the support that Intel is getting for its Core Ultra from virtually every PC maker is impressive,” he said.
Into the clouds
The analyst also focused on edge, cloud and data center workloads, which he said Intel is serving with its newest generation of the Xeon processor for data center and cloud.
“This is a critical area for Intel as it couples its high end compute solutions with its AI acceleration technology, and offers a range of products for power efficient Edge compute all the way up to massive cloud data center processors,” he said. “It’s important to remember that many current and future workloads will run on integrated processors. With many modest AI model training needs, and especially for inference, Xeon is a strong alternative to special purpose high cost Nvidia chips.”
Even as major hyperscalers build their own custom chips specific to their needs, the majority of cloud workloads still run on Intel processors, Gold wrote. “Next gen Xeon will continue this trend and I expect a huge number of Xeons to end up in hyperscaler data centers.”
The analyst concludes that as AI moves from high-end graphics-heavy AI workloads, there is an opportunity for Intel to compete with Nvidia, as AI becomes more personal.