Intel to launch AI chip as it competes with Nvidia and AMD, says its processors will be 'different'

Intel has announced that it will launch an artificial intelligence (AI) chip for the data centre next year as part of a renewed push to break into the AI chip market dominated by Nvidia and AMD . The new chip, called Crescent Island , will be optimised for energy efficiency and support a wide range of uses such as running AI applications and inference.

“It emphasises that focus that I talked about earlier, inference, optimized for AI, optimized, optimized for delivering the best token economics out there, the best performance per dollar out there," said Intel CTO Sachin Katti said at the Open Compute Summit this week.

Intel’s mix and match AI chip strategy
Intel has taken an open and modular approach, Katti said, explaining that this will allow its customers to mix and match chips from different vendors. For example, this means that if a company needs 2,00,000 AI Nvidia chips and are not able to procure the desired number, they can get Intel chips to get the required compute power.

This strategy differs from Nvidia's more integrated ecosystem and represents Intel's effort to position itself as a flexible alternative.

Intel Crescent Island AI chip technical specifications
Intel Crescent Island will feature 160GB of a slower form of memory than the high bandwidth memory that is found on AMD and Nvidia's data center AI chips. The chip will be based on a design that Intel has used for its consumer GPUs. Intel did not disclose which manufacturing process Crescent Island would use.

Katti also said the company would release new data centre AI chips every year, which would match the annual cadence set by AMD, Nvidia, and several cloud computing companies that make their own chips.

“Instead of trying to build for every workload out there, our focus is increasingly going to be on inference,” Katti said.

Nvidia said last month it would invest $5 billion in Intel, taking a roughly 4% stake and becoming one of its largest shareholders as part of a partnership to co-develop future PC and data center chips. The deal is part of Intel's effort to ensure that Intel's central processors are installed in every AI system that gets sold, Katti said.