With claims that Intel’s new artificial intelligence (AI) accelerator Gaudi 3 significantly outperforms Nvidia’s H100 GPU, and that it will ship before Nvidia’s latest Blackwell GPUs, “the leapfrogging is on,” Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger told a group of reporters following the Intel Vision keynote.

Nvidia, which represented more than 90% of GPU revenue share in 2023, is “a good competitor,” Gelsinger said.

Though a sizable cavern exists between Nvidia and its rivals, Intel “could gain some share from Nvidia this year,” Dell’Oro Sr. Research Director Baron Fung told SDxCentral.

​​“The world needs more suppliers, and we're quite dedicated to being one of those suppliers,” Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said.

In particular, the total cost of ownership (TCO) for Intel’s Gaudi AI accelerators is more attractive to customers like Bosch, Infosys and Seekr. “People want an alternative,” Gelsinger  said. “The TCO, in addition to the great performance that we’re seeing, is extremely good.”

As enterprises begin to run and deploy AI use cases more broadly, TCO becomes much more relevant and complex, consisting of not only chip and system prices, but performance and energy use.

Intel claims its Gaudi 3 GPU is, on average, 50% quicker at inference and 40% more energy efficient than the Nvidia H100 GPUs – and will be available for a fraction of the cost.

“We are very comfortable saying we are going to be well below the price points that have been quoted for [Nvidia] H100s and Blackwells. Not a little below – a lot below,” Gelsinger said. “The TCO benefits that we already demonstrate with Gaudi 2 are quite significant, and they're only going to get better as we go to Gaudi 3.”

By leveraging an open, community-based software stack and Ethernet networking, Gaudi 3 gives enterprises flexibility to scale from one node to multiple clusters, super-clusters and mega-clusters with thousands of nodes.

“Customers are very excited about the work that we're doing with Ultra Ethernet and standardizing scale up and scale out networking for data center solutions,” Gelsinger said.

Gaudi 3 will be available through OEMs like Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Supermicro and Lenovo in Q2 2024. “We now have our ecosystem showing up, and that's a powerful force,” he said.