Intel announced new AI chips to challenge Nvidia’s dominance

Semiconductor pioneer Intel may have fallen behind in the artificial intelligence chips race, but it’s doing its best to catch up.

Intel chief executive Pat Gelsinger unveiled the Xeon 6 processor at COMPUTEX, an annual tech trade show in Taiwan, on Tuesday — two days after rival Nvidia, and one day after Advanced Micro Devices, unveiled their next-generation AI chips. The company’s new processor will deliver better performance and power efficiency than its predecessor for high-density workloads in data centers, Gelsinger said. Intel also announced that pricing for its Gaudi 2 and Gaudi 3 AI accelerators is lower than its chip rivals.

The chipmaker unveiled its Gaudi 3 AI accelerator in April, which it said has more AI computing power, networking bandwidth, and memory bandwidth than its predecessor, Gaudi 2, to scale up AI training and inferencing on large language models (LLMs). It also said the AI accelerator put it “way ahead of Nvidia.”

“Customers are looking for high performance, cost-effective gen AI training and inferencing solutions,” Gelsinger said at COMPUTEX. “And they’ve started to turn to alternatives like Gaudi. They want choice. They want open software and hardware solutions and time to market solutions at dramatically lower TCOs [total cost of ownership].”

Read more: Google and Intel are challenging Nvidia’s AI chip dominance. It won’t be easy

Gelsinger also mentioned Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang, who said traditional processors, such as the ones produced by Intel, can’t keep up in the AI era.

“Unlike what Jensen would have you believe, Moore’s Law is alive and well,” Gelsinger said. “I think of it like the internet 25 years ago, it’s that big. We see this as the fuel that’s driving the semiconductor industry to reach $1 trillion by the end of the decade.”

Intel also unveiled details on the architecture of its Lunar Lake processors, which it says will be essential “to continue to grow the AI PC category.” Lunar Lake is expected to ship in the third quarter of this year, “in time for the holiday buying season,” the company said.

Robert Hallock, vice president and general manager of Client AI at Intel, told Quartz in an interview that its chips for AI PCs will become more important over the next few years as more applications integrate AI capabilities and need hardware that can continue delivering fast and efficient performance. Hallock added that Intel is one of the only companies in the world delivering on both hardware and software AI developments.