Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger came out swinging at Nvidia's CUDA technology, claiming that inference technology will be more important than training for AI as he launched Intel Core Ultra and 5th Gen Xeon datacenter chips in an event here in New York City. Taking questions at the NASDAQ, Gelsinger suggested that Nvidia’s CUDA dominance in training wouldn't last forever.
"You know, the entire industry is motivated to eliminate the CUDA market," Gelsinger said. He cited examples such as MLIR, Google, and OpenAI, suggesting that they are moving to a "Pythonic programming layer" to make AI training more open.
"We think of the CUDA moat as shallow and small," Gelsinger went on. "Because the industry is motivated to bring a broader set of technologies for broad training, innovation, data science, et cetera."
But Intel isn't relying just on training. Instead, it thinks inference is the way to go.
"As inferencing occurs, hey, once you've trained the model… There is no CUDA dependency," Gelsinger continued. "It's all about, can you run that model well?" He suggested that with Gaudi 3, shown on stage for the first time, that Intel will be up to the challenge, and will be able to do it as well with Xeon and edge PCs. Not that Intel won't compete in training, but "fundamentally, the inference market is where the game will be at," Gelsinger said.
He also took the opportunity to push OpenVINO, the standard that Intel has gathered around for its AI efforts, and predicted a world of mixed computing, some that occurs in the cloud, and others that happen on your PC.
Sandra Rivera, executive vice president and general manager of the Data Center and AI Group at Intel, added that Intel's scale from the data center to the PC may make it a partner of choice, as it can produce at volume.
"We're going to compete three ways for 100% of the datacenter AI TAM." Gelsinger said, tacking onto Rivera's comment. "With our leadership CEOs, leadership accelerators, and as a foundry. Every one of those internal opportunities is available to us: The TPUs, the inferentias, the trainiums, et cetera. We're going to pursue all of those. And we're going to pursue every commercial opportunity as well, with NVIDIA, with AMD, et cetera. We're going to be a foundry player."
It's a bold strategy, and Gelsinger appeared confident as he led his team through presentations today. Can he truly take on CUDA? Only time will tell as applications for the chips Intel launched today — and that his competitors are also working on — become more widespread.
