In an exclusive interview with CRN, Intel’s new CEO Patrick Gelsinger made some bold claims. Apart from (claiming) to put an end to AMD’s supremacy with Alder Lake and Sapphire Rapids, he also took a jab at NVIDIA. It’s important to note that, unlike AMD, NVIDIA isn’t the underdog in the gaming and HPC/compute segment. (Skypointcloud.com) In fact, it has (more or less) a complete monopoly in the AI space.
According to Gelsinger, Intel plans to tackle NVIDIA’s dominance by adopting a more ecosystem-friendly approach. The company has already taken multiple steps in this regard. The open-source oneAPI being one of the most important. Intel’s XeSS upsampling technology rivals NVIDIA’s own DLSS tech, both in terms of scale and quality is planned to go open-source after release as well.
He further stated that Intel won’t compete with NVIDIA’s OEM channel partners by selling pre-built machines such as the DGX series for AI and neural network training.
I may need to do some appliances early on to help kickstart the industry, but I‘m going to do it in a way that even when I’m building appliances, it’s sort of like, yeah, yeah, go take my appliance but then get me out of the appliance business.
Pat Gelsinger, Intel CEO
One of the primary benefits of oneAPI is that allows developers to use the same programming layer for different architectures, across CPUs, GPUs, and FPGAs from different vendors (including NVIDIA). This greatly simplifies the programming, and as such should be an attractive opportunity for many developers, especially indie and small-sized companies.
Nvidia has become too proprietary, and that‘s widely seen in the industry, and so we’re going to fill out that stack with oneAPI but do it in a way that’s much more favorable and open to the industry and their innovations. The architectural disruption that I‘m more concerned about in the data center is the AI one, not the Arm one, and in that sense, hey, [Intel’s] products are starting to come forward to put pressure on, I’ll say, an uncontested Nvidia. Well, they’re going to get contested going forward, because we’re bringing leadership products into that segment.
Pat Gelsinger, Intel CEO
Source: CRN
