As AI continues to revolutionize industries, enterprises are
increasingly in need of infrastructure that is both cost-effective and
available for rapid development and deployment. To meet this demand
head-on, Intel launched Xeon 6 with Performance-cores (P-cores)
and Gaudi 3 AI accelerators, bolstering the company's commitment to
deliver powerful AI systems with optimal performance per watt and lower
total cost of ownership (TCO).
"Demand for AI is leading to a massive transformation in the data
center, and the industry is asking for choice in hardware, software and
developer tools," said Justin Hotard, Intel executive vice president and
general manager of the Data Center and Artificial Intelligence Group. "With
our launch of Xeon 6 with P-cores and Gaudi 3 AI accelerators, Intel is
enabling an open ecosystem that allows our customers to implement all
of their workloads with greater performance, efficiency and security."
Introducing Intel Xeon 6 with P-cores and Gaudi 3 AI accelerators
Intel's latest advancements in AI infrastructure include two major updates to its data center portfolio:
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Intel® Xeon® 6 with P-cores: Designed to
handle compute-intensive workloads with exceptional efficiency, Xeon 6
delivers twice the performance of its predecessor. It
features increased core count, double the memory bandwidth and AI
acceleration capabilities embedded in every core. This processor is
engineered to meet the performance demands of AI from edge to data
center and cloud environments.
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Intel® Gaudi® 3 AI Accelerator: Specifically
optimized for large-scale generative AI, Gaudi 3 boasts 64 Tensor
processor cores (TPCs) and eight matrix multiplication engines (MMEs) to
accelerate deep neural network computations. It includes 128 gigabytes
(GB) of HBM2e memory for training and inference, and 24 200 Gigabit (Gb)
Ethernet ports for scalable networking. Gaudi 3 also offers seamless
compatibility with the PyTorch framework and advanced Hugging Face
transformer and diffuser models. Intel recently announced a
collaboration with IBM to deploy Intel Gaudi 3 AI accelerators as a
service on IBM Cloud. Through this collaboration, Intel and IBM aim to
lower the total cost of ownership to leverage and scale AI, while
enhancing performance.
Enhancing AI Systems with TCO Benefits
Deploying AI at scale involves considerations such as flexible
deployment options, competitive price-performance ratios and accessible
AI technologies. Intel's robust x86 infrastructure and extensive open
ecosystem position it to support enterprises in building high-value AI
systems with an optimal TCO and performance per watt. Notably, 73% of
GPU-accelerated servers use Intel Xeon as the host CPU.
Intel partners with leading OEMs including Dell Technologies and
Supermicro to develop co-engineered systems tailored to specific
customer needs for effective AI deployments. Dell Technologies is
currently co-engineering RAG-based solutions leveraging Gaudi 3 and Xeon
6.
Bridging the Gap from Prototypes to Production with Co-Engineering Efforts
Transitioning generative AI (Gen AI) solutions from prototypes to
production-ready systems presents challenges in real-time monitoring,
error handling, logging, security and scalability. Intel addresses these
challenges through co-engineering efforts with OEMs and partners to
deliver production-ready retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) solutions.
These solutions, built on the Open Platform Enterprise AI (OPEA)
platform, integrate OPEA-based microservices into a scalable RAG
system, optimized for Xeon and Gaudi AI systems, designed to allow
customers to easily integrate applications from Kubernetes, Red Hat
OpenShift AI and Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI.
Expanding Access to Enterprise AI Applications
Intel's Tiber portfolio offers business solutions to tackle challenges
such as access, cost, complexity, security, efficiency and scalability
across AI, cloud and edge environments. The Intel® TiberTM Developer
Cloud now provides preview systems of Intel Xeon 6 for tech evaluation
and testing. Additionally, select customers will gain early access to
Intel Gaudi 3 for validating AI model deployments, with Gaudi 3 clusters
to begin rolling out next quarter for large-scale production
deployments.
New service offerings include SeekrFlow, an end-to-end AI platform from
Seekr for developing trusted AI applications. The latest updates feature
Intel Gaudi software's newest release and Jupyter notebooks loaded with
PyTorch 2.4 and Intel oneAPI and AI tools 2024.2, which include new AI
acceleration capabilities and support for Xeon 6 processors.