Intel's Gaudi 3 will cost half the price of Nvidia's H100

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Intel's latest Gaudi 3 AI processor will cost around $15,650

Intel Gaudi 3
(Image credit: Intel)

When Intel announced its Gaudi 2 and Gaudi 3 accelerators for AI, it said that the total cost of ownership would be a fraction of that of Nvidia's H100, but never revealed any actual numbers. At the Intel's keynote at Computex 2024 the company finally revealed pricing of its latest AI processors and it appears that eight Gaudi 2 processors on a baseboard will cost less than one Nvidia B200 is rumored to cost.

Intel charges $65,000 per eight Gaudi 2 accelerators on a baseboard and $125,000 per eight Gaudi 3 processors on a baseboard, as shown by our colleague Jim McGregor from Tirias Research. This means that a single Gaudi 2 is priced at around $8,125, whereas a Gaudi 3 costs around $15,650 — of course, when purchased in bulk and with a baseboard. Yet, for large customers buying in huge quantities Intel can certainly make further per-unit discounts.

By contrast, Nvidia's H100 80GB cards cost $30,000 — and more when purchased retail, though these cards offer lower performance than H100 80GB SXM modules. HSBC projects that Nvidia's 'entry-level' next-generation B100 GPU based on the Blackwell architecture will have an average selling price (ASP) ranging from $30,000 to $35,000, which is comparable to the price of Nvidia's H100. The more powerful GB200, which integrates a single Grace CPU with two B200 GPUs, is expected to be priced between $60,000 and $70,000. However, it's important to note that these are just analyst estimates, and that the actual cost could be significantly higher.

Selling Gaudi accelerators for AI at a discount is not unexpected. Intel is currently an underdog in a market dominated by Nvidia, which benefits from the fact that many AI workloads are tailored for its CUDA platform in general and the Hopper architecture in particular. Intel has to fight not only against Nvidia, but against custom in-house-designed AI processors used by cloud service providers like AWS and Google. These accelerators come without a markup and for Intel it is particularly hard to compete against them. In fact, competing against custom silicon could be even harder for Intel because it needs to earn selling its products, while companies like AWS do not.

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Anton Shilov
Anton Shilov
Contributing Writer

Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.

8 Comments Comment from the forums
  • redgarl
    why would you buy a Gaudi 3 Accelerator when you can buy a MI300x for the same price?
    Reply
  • dalek1234
    redgarl said:
    why would you buy a Gaudi 3 Accelerator when you can buy a MI300x for the same price?
    In the world where AMD can supply MI300's en mass, the answer is "no one", but AMD can't produce them fast enough, so some desperate people will waste their money on Gaudi.
    Reply
  • Jimbojan
    redgarl said:
    why would you buy a Gaudi 3 Accelerator when you can buy a MI300x for the same price?
    Because Gaudi 3 is faster with better performance and power efficiency.
    Reply
  • dalek1234
    Jimbojan said:
    Because Gaudi 3 is faster with better performance and power efficiency.
    None of this is know yet with certainty. We need to wait for independent 3rd party reviewers. What we do know from specifications is that Gaudi has slower HBM and less of it than MI300.

    MLID, who has access to some good leaks, is basically calling Gaudi 3 "an MI300 with less HBM"
    Reply
  • DS426
    Intel has a decent AI software stack as well and in some ways more mature and appropriate depending on what's being done, namely compared to AMD anyways. It's good to have competition, and really, not everyone is suited to pay for excessive prices on B200 because demand significantly outstrips supply.
    Reply
  • NeoMorpheus
    redgarl said:
    why would you buy a Gaudi 3 Accelerator when you can buy a MI300x for the same price?
    Because if i lived under a rock and this article was my only source of information, i wouldnt even know that AMD offered such products.

    This is becoming an interesting trend in Toms where writers can publish such articles and manage to completely avoid the name AMD.
    Reply
  • subspruce
    I didn't know new Intel ventures even REACH the 3rd gen
    Reply
  • PCWarrior
    redgarl said:
    why would you buy a Gaudi 3 Accelerator when you can buy a MI300x for the same price?
    Because Intel is the only one that offers a software suit that competes with Nvidia (OneAPI versus CUDA). Also Gaudi 3 is cheaper. It's $15K while the MI300x is $20K. And another reason is the availability. That also is related to cost too as low availability means that actual prices of AMD and Nvidia GPUs have skyrocketed.
    Reply