The artificial intelligence (AI) industry is booming. Thanks to widespread public acceptance of tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, the technology is in demand like never before. Without question, the mass majority of chips powering those AI applications come from Nvidia.
The GPU maker controls upwards of 95% of the AI chip market and has seen its stock price rise by more than 100% since the start of 2023. While it’s clear that Nvidia is the uncontested frontrunner in AI chip production, the industry is heating up.
After several setbacks and failures of its Ponte Vecchio chip, Intel is preparing to rejoin the fray. The company recently unveiled the first details of its new “Falcon Shores” chip at a supercomputing conference in Germany.
Slated for release in 2025, the all-new Falcon Shores design will be Intel’s flagship foray into the AI chip sector. The company’s recent announcement offered a small, but noteworthy glimpse of what the new chips will offer.
Falcon Shores will feature 288 gigabytes of HBM3 memory, making it attractive to businesses looking for chips to run powerful AI models. Meanwhile, the new chip will also support 8-bit floating point computation. This is another in-demand feature for AI applications.
Intel’s Falcon Shores chip is designed to compete with offerings from both Nvidia and AMD. The latter currently plans to challenge Nvidia’s stranglehold on the AI market with a powerful chip called the MI300. The 146-billion transistor chip is the largest AMD has produced to date and includes 128 gigabytes of memory. AMD claims the MI300 challenges Nvidia’s most recent offering, the H100 which is packed with 80 billion transistors and 188 gigabytes of memory. Given that Falcon Shores won’t be released until 2025, it’s likely Nvidia will already have another flagship model to market. Time will tell whether Intel’s upcoming offering will be able to outpace the market leader’s next effort—not just its current.