So, they're selling this as an AI accelerator, with drop in compatibility with existing boards, and no boost to RAM bandwidth.

As I understand things, it would be extremely unusual to ship a chip that was bound by floating point throughput, not uncached memory access, especially in the desktop/laptop space.

I haven't been following the Intel server space too carefully, so it's an honest question: Was the old thing compute and not bandwidth limited, or is this going to be running inference at the same throughput (though maybe with lower power consumption)?

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Tepix 4 hours ago | parent [-]

No, they're not selling this as an "AI accelerator":

Here is the quote:

"The company says operators deploying 5G Advanced and future 6G networks increasingly rely on server CPUs for virtualized RAN and edge AI inference, as they do not want to re-architect their data centers in a bid to accommodate AI accelerators."

Edge AI usually means very small models that run fine on CPUs.

	▲	hedora 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		A very small model is going to be, what, 8GB? That'll easily blow through the caches. You're going to end up bottlenecked on DRAM either way. So, I wonder if this is going to be any faster than the previous generation for edge AI.