The new CEO of Intel has said that Intel is giving up competing with Nvidia.

Why would you bother with any Intel product with an attitude like that, gives zero confidence in the company. What business is Intel in, if not competing with Nvidia and AMD. Is it giving up competing with AMD too?

▲ jlei523 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

  The new CEO of Intel has said that Intel is giving up competing with Nvidia.

No, he said they're giving up competing against Nvidia in training. Instead, he said Intel will focus on inference.

That's the correct call in my opinion. Training is far more complex and will span multi data centers soon. Intel is too far behind. Inference is much simpler and likely a bigger market going forward.

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IshKebab 3 days ago | parent [-]

I disagree - training enormous LLMs is super complex and requires a data centre... But most research is not done at that scale. If you want researchers to use your hardware at scale you also have to make it so they can spend a few grand and do small scale research with one GPU on their desktop.

That's how you get things like good software support in AI frameworks.

	▲	jlei523 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I disagree with you. You don't need researchers to use your client hardware in order to make inference chips. All big tech are making inference chips in house. AMD and Apple are making local inference do-able on client. Inference is vastly simpler than training or scientific compute.

▲ SadTrombone 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

AMD has also often said that they can't compete with Nvidia at the high end, and as the other commenter said: market segments exist. Not everyone needs a 5090. If anything, people are starved for options in the budget/mid-range market, which is where Intel could pick up a solid chunk of market share.

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pshirshov 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Regardless of what they say, they CAN compete in training and inference, there is literally no alternative to W7900 at the moment. That's 4080 performance with 48Gb VRAM for half of what similar CUDA devices would costs.

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grim_io 4 days ago | parent [-]

How good is it though compared to 5090 with 32GB? 5090 has double the memory bandwidth, which is very important for inference.

In many cases where 32GB won't be enough, 48 wouldn't be enough either.

Oh and the 5090 is cheaper.

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adgjlsfhk1 4 days ago | parent [-]

AMD has more FP16 and FP64 flops (but ~1/2 the FP32 flops). Also the AMD is at half the TDP (300 vs 600 W)

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grim_io 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

FP16+ doesn't really matter for local LLM inference, no one can run reasonably big models at FP16. Usually the models are quantized to 8/4 bits, where the 5090 again demolishes the w7900 by having a multiple of max TOPS.

	▲	adgjlsfhk1 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		with 48 GB of vram you could run a 20b model at fp16. It won't be a better GPU for everything, but it definitely beats a 5090 for some use case. It's also a generation old, and the newer rx9070 seems like it should be pretty competitive with a 5090 from a flops perspective, so a workstation model with 32 gb of vram and a less cut back core would be interesting.

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lostmsu 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

The FP16 bit is very wrong re: LLMs. 5090 has 3.5x FP16 for LLMs. 400+ vs ~120 Tops.

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Mistletoe 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I’m interested in buying a GPU that costs less than a used car.

	▲	imtringued 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Jerry rig MI50 32GiB together and then hate yourself for choosing AMD.

▲ ksec 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>What business is Intel in, if not competing with Nvidia and AMD.

Foundry business. The latest report on Discreet Graphics Market share Nvidia has 94%, AMD at 6% and Intel at 0%.

I may still have another 12 months to go. But in 2016 I made a bet against Intel engineers on Twitter and offline suggesting GPU is not a business they want to be in, or at least too late. They said at the time they will get 20% market share minimum by 2021. I said I would be happy if they did even 20% by 2026.

Intel is also losing money, they need cashflow to compete in Foundry business. I have long argued they should have cut off GPU segment when Pat Gelsinger arrives, turns out Intel bound themselves to GPU by all the government contract and supercomputer they promised to make. Now that they have delivered it all or mostly they will need to think about whether to continue or not.

Unfortunately unless US point guns at TSMC I just dont see how Intel will be able to compete, as Intel needs to be a leading edge position in order to command the margin required for Intel to function. Right now in terms of density Intel 18A is closer to TSMC N3 then N2.

	▲	baq 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The problem is they can’t not attempt or they’ll simply die of irrelevance in a few years. GPUs will eat the world. If NVidia gets complacent as Intel has become when they had the market share in the CPU space, there is opportunity for Intel, AMD and others in NVidias margin.
	▲	MangoToupe 4 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> Unfortunately unless US point guns at TSMC They may not have to, frankly, depending on when China decides to move on Taiwan. It's useless to speculate—but it was certainly a hell of a gamble to open a SOTA (or close to it—4 nm is nothing to sneeze at) fab outside of the island.

▲ grg0 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Zero confidence why? Market segments exist.

I want hardware that I can afford and own, not AI/datacenter crap that is useless to me.

▲ ryao 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I thought that he said that they gave up at competing with Nvidia at training, not in general. He left the door open to compete on inference. Did he say otherwise more recently?

▲ mathnode 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Because we don't need data centre hardware to run domestic software.

▲ MangoToupe 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't really want an nvidia gpu; it's too expensive and I won't use most of it. This actually looks attractive.

▲ ocdtrekkie 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

NVIDIA cards are unironically over $3,500 at the store in some cases...

▲ jasonfrost 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Isn't Intel the only largely domestic fab

▲ high_na_euv 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Wtf? Source on that?