Intel unveiled its vision for enterprise AI at the Vision 2024 event, introducing its vision for an open AI ecosystem as well as new Xeon 6 data center processors.
Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said in a keynote at the Vision 2024 event in Phoenix, Arizona that tehc ompany will focus on open and more secure enterprise AI. Santa Clara, California-based Intel touted its new customers and partners across the AI software and hardware stack.
Together with its partners, Intel announced the intention to create an open platform for enterprise AI to accelerate deployment of secure GenAI systems, enabled by retrieval augmented generation (RAG).
Intel said it has a scalable systems strategy to address all segments of AI within the enterprise with an open ecosystem approach. That approach of openness is very different from the Intel of the 1990s, which it was clearly dominant because of the PC. But now Nvidia is dominant AI chips, and Intel has to push the strategy of offering an open alternative to the industry giant.
Gelsinger said that Intel is committed to being the No. 2 foundry, or contract manufacturer of chips for other companies, by the end of the decade. He said that investment — including an $8.5 billion grant from the U.S. Commerce Department — is necessary to fuel the AI boom, which Gelsinger considers to be the most exciting in technology history since the internet.
Gelsinger said that technology should deliver choice and competition, and he said, “Intel is on a mission to bring AI everywhere.” Intel has already shipped five million chips for AI PCs and he said it will hit 40 million by year end.
“Before competitors ship their first chip, we’re shipping our second,” he said.
He said the second chips is code-named Lunar Lake.
“AI will be enabling every business critical user,” he said.
“We’re embracing openness at every layer of the stack. Obviously we have our chips. Those are a product. But when you have a CPU and a GPU or an accelerator, you need to stitch them together using networking and open standards,” said Sachin Katti, senior vice president of the network and edge group at Intel, in an interview with VentureBeat.
Working with the Ultra Ethernet Consortium, Katti said Intel is leading open Ethernet networking for AI fabrics and introduced the AI NIC (network interface card), AI connectivity chiplets for integration into XPUs, Gaudi-based systems, and a range of soft and hard reference AI interconnect designs for Intel Foundry.
“When you put our things together, our CPUs and accelerators together, the networking is open and ethernet-based. It’s going to be stitched together using open standards that are ethernet-based. That’s the hardware layer,” Katti said. “The next step is the software layer. Unlike CUDA, oneAPI and oneDNN from Intel, which is the equivalent layer, is in UXL from the Linux Foundation. It’s completely open source. Multiple companies contribute to it. There’s no restriction on its use. It’s not tied to a particular hardware. It can be used with many pieces of hardware. There are multiple ecosystem players contributing to it.”
One of its big projects is the Intel Gaudi 3 AI accelerator, which can deliver 50% on average better inference and 40% better power efficiency than the Nvidia H100 AI computer. And Intel said it would sell it at a fraction of the cost, shipping to computer makers such as HPE, Lenovo and Supermicro.
Katti said, “The thing I want to emphasize, we’re making sure that all the way from the lowest levels of the system, hardware and open networking, to every layer of the software stack, we are embracing open source and open standards. But we’re making sure that we do not leave the complexity of putting all this together and making sure it works to the end customer. When I say we’ll deliver a reference system design, we will put it together, validate it, and make sure that when you get that reference system productized from our OEM, it just works.”
Xeon 6
Intel said its new Xeon 6 Processors offer performance-efficient solution to run current GenAI solutions including RAG that produce business-specific results using proprietary data. Gelsinger noted that 60% of computing is done in data centers, and 90% of unstructured data is unused. With LLMs and RAG, we can make use of that data, he said. He noted Xeons can increasingly run LLMs without complex solutions.
Intel introduced the new brand for its next-generation processors for data centers, cloud and edge: Intel
Xeon 6. Intel Xeon 6 processors with new Efficient-cores (E-core) will deliver exceptional efficiency and launch this quarter, while Intel Xeon 6 with Performance-cores (P-core) will offer increased AI performance and launch soon after the E-core processors.
Intel Xeon 6 processors with E-cores (formerly code-named Sierra Forest): 2.4 times performance per watt improvement and 2.7 times better rack density compared to 2nd Gen Intel Xeon processors.
Intel Xeon 6 processors with P-cores (formerly code-named Granite Rapids) will incorporate software support for the MXFP4 data format, which reduces next token latency by up to 6.5x versus 4th Gen Xeon using FP16, with the ability to run 70 billion parameter Llama-2 models. Gelsinger showed both Xeon 6 Sierra Forrest and Granite Rapids wafers on stage.
Gaudi 3 accelerators
Gaudi 3 accelerator customers include Bosch, CtrlS, IFF, Landing AI, Ola, NAVER, NielsenIQ, Roboflow, and Seekr. These devices will go into a new suite of open scalable systems, new products and strategic collaborations to accelerate the adoption of generative AI in the enterprise.
With only 10% of enterprises successfully moving GenAI projects into production last year, Intel’s latest offerings address the challenges businesses face in scaling AI initiatives, Gelsinger said.
“Innovation is advancing at an unprecedented pace, all enabled by silicon – and every company is quickly becoming an AI company,” said Gelsinger. “Intel is bringing AI everywhere across the enterprise from the PC to the data center to the edge. Our latest Gaudi, Xeon and Core Ultra platforms are delivering a cohesive set of flexible solutions tailored to meet the changing needs of our customers and capitalize on the immense opportunities ahead.”
Generating value with Intel AI solutions
Intel outlined its strategy for open scalable AI systems, including hardware, software, frameworks and tools. Intel’s approach enables a broad, open ecosystem of AI players to offer solutions that satisfy
enterprise-specific GenAI needs.
This includes equipment manufacturers, database providers, systems integrators, software and service providers and more. It also allows enterprises to use the ecosystem partners and solutions that they already know and trust.
Intel shared broad momentum with enterprise customers and partners across industries to deploy Intel
Gaudi accelerator solutions for new and innovative generative AI applications. To develop a powerful LLM model for the deployment of advanced AI services globally, from cloud to on-device, NAVER has confirmed Intel Gaudi’s foundational capability in executing compute operations for large-scale Transformer models with outstanding performance per watt.
Bosch will also adopt Intel hardware to explore further opportunities for smart manufacturing including foundational models, generating synthetic data sets of manufacturing anomalies to provide robust, evenly-distributed training sets for e.g. automated optical inspection.
To pre-train and fine-tune their first India foundational model with generative capabilities in 10 languages, Ola/Krutrim is now pre-training a larger foundational model on a Gaudi 2 cluster.
NielsenIQ, an Advent International portfolio company, will enhance its Gen AI capabilities by
training domain-specific LLMs on the world’s largest consumer buying behavior database,
enhancing client service offerings while adhering to rigorous privacy standards.
And Seekr runs production workloads on Intel Gaudi 2, Intel Max Series GPUs and Intel Xeon processors in the Intel Developer Cloud for LLM development and production deployment support.
IFF — a leader in food, beverage, scent, and biosciences — will leverage GenAI and digital twin
technology to establish an integrated digital biology workflow for advanced enzyme design and
fermentation process optimization.
CtrlS Group will collaborate to build an AI supercomputer for India-based customers and scale
CtrlS cloud services for India with additional Gaudi clusters.
Roboflow will run production workloads of YOLOv5, YOLOv8, CLIP, SAM and ViT models for
their end-to-end computer vision platform.
Intel also announced collaborations with Google Cloud, Thales and Cohesity to leverage Intel’s confidential computing capabilities in their cloud instances. This includes Intel Trust Domain Extensions
(Intel TDX), Intel Software Guard Extensions (Intel SGX) and Intel’s attestation service.
Customers can run their AI models and algorithms in a trusted execution environment (TEE) and leverage Intel’s trust services to provide independent attestation for their C3 virtual machine instances.
Open platform for enterprise AI
Intel announced the intention to create an open platform for enterprise AI. The industrywide effort aims to develop open, multi-vendor GenAI systems that deliver best-in-class ease-of-deployment, performance and value, enabled by retrieval-augmented generation.
RAG enables enterprises’ vast, existing, proprietary data sources running on standard, secure Intel Xeon-based solutions to be augmented with open LLM capabilities, accelerating GenAI use in enterprises. As initial steps in this effort, Intel will release reference implementations for GenAI pipelines, publish a technical conceptual framework, and continue to add infrastructure capacity in the Intel Developer Cloud for ecosystem development and validation of RAG and future pipelines.
Intel encourages further participation of the ecosystem to join forces in this open effort to facilitate enterprise adoption and business results.
Intel’s expanded AI roadmap and open ecosystem approach
In addition to the Intel Gaudi 3 accelerator, Intel provided updates on its next-generation products and
services across all segments of enterprise AI.
Intel announced momentum for client and updates to its roadmap for edge and connectivity including Intel Core Ultra processors, which are powering new capabilities for productivity, security and content creation, providing a great motivation for businesses to refresh their PC fleets. Intel expects to ship 40 million AI PCs in 2024, with more than 230 designs – from ultra-thin PCs to handheld gaming devices.
Intel announced new edge silicon across the Intel Core Ultra, Intel Core, Intel Atom processors and Intel Arc graphics processing unit (GPU) families of products, targeting key markets including retail, industrial manufacturing and healthcare. All new additions to Intel’s edge AI portfolio will be available this quarter and will be supported by the Intel Edge Platform this year.
Michael Dell, CEO of Dell, said that enterprises are moving from AI trials to deployments this year. He said Dell is adding Gaudi 3 to its lineup this year and it’s embracing the open AI ecosystem. He said we are moving from calculation and computation to cognition. Dell is launching products with the Gaudi 3 AI accelerator later this year
“The urgency for GenAI continues to grow,” he said. “Enterprises are demanding more AI processing to satisfy their needs.”