Intel puts a huge priority on DL framework support before releasing related hardware, going back to at least 2017.

I assume that hasn't changed.

OpenVino is entirely open-source and can run PyTorch and ONNX models, so this is definitely not a topic of concern. PyTorch also has native Intel GPU support https://docs.pytorch.org/docs/stable/notes/get_start_xpu.htm...

> What's the advantage here?

Stock number go up

The AI bubble might not last another year. Better get a few more pumps in before it blows.

To keep investors happy and stock from failing? Fairy tales work as well, see Tesla robots.

If you're Intel sized, it's gonna leak. If you announce it first, you get to control the message.

The other thing is enterprise sales is ridiculously slow. If Intel wants corporate customers to buy these things, they've got to announce them ~a year ahead, in order for those customers to buy them next year when they upgrade hardware.

If customers know your product exists before they can buy it then they may wait for it. If they buy the competitor's product today because they don't know your product will exist until the day they can buy it then you lose the sale.

Samples of new products also have to go out to third party developers and reviewers ahead of time so that third party support is ready for launch day and that stuff is going to leak to competitors anyway so there's little point in not making it public.

In this case there is no risk of anyone stealing Intel's ideas or even reacting to them.

First, they're not even an also-ran in the AI compute space. Nobody is looking to them for roadmap ideas. Intel does not have any credibility, and no customer is going to be going to Nvidia and demanding that they match Intel.

Second, what exactly would the competitors react to? The only concrete technical detail is that the cards will hopefully launch in 2027 and have 160GB of memory.

The cost of doing this is really low, and the value of potentially getting into the pipeline of people looking to buy data center GPUs in 2027 soon enough to matter is high.

This is a shareholder “me too” product

I don't think you're giving much advantage to anybody really on such a small timeframe.

Semiconductors are like container ships, they are extremely slow and hard to steer, you plan today the products you'll release in 2030.

It can also prevent competitors from entering a particular space. I was told as an undergraduate that UNIX was irrelevant because the upcoming Windows NT would be POSIX compliant. It took a _very_ long time before that happened (and for a very flexible version of "compliant"), but the pointy-headed bosses thought that buying Microsoft was the future. And at first glance the upcoming NT _looked_ as if the TCO would be much lower than AIX, HPuX or Solaris.

Then of course Linux took over everywhere except the desktop.

Maybe not that low, but given it's using LPDDR5 instead of GDDR7, at least the ram should be a lot cheaper.

With this much ram don’t expect anything remotely affordable by civilians.

How does LPDDR5 (This Xe3P) compare with GDDR7 (Nvidia's flagships) when it comes to inference performance?

Local inference is an interesting proposition because today in real life, the NV H300 and AMD MI-300 clusters are operated by OpenAI and Anthropic in batching mode, which slows users down as they're forced to wait for enough similar sized queries to arrive. For local inference, no waiting is required - so you could get potentially higher throughput.

Isn't that precisely what DGX Spark is designed for?

How is this better?

Yeah, Intel's problem is that this is (at least) the third time they've announced a new ML accelerator platform, and the first two got shitcanned. At this point I wouldn't even glance at an Intel product in this space until it had been on the market for at least five years and several iterations, to be somewhat sure it isn't going to be killed, and Intel's current leadership inspires no confidence that they'll wait that long for success.

Xe works much much better than Larabee or Xeon Phi ever did. Xe3 might even be good.

Dude, this is asinine. Graphics cards have been doing matrix and vector operations since they were invented. No one had a problem with calling matrix multiplers graphics cards until it became cool to hate AI.

This sounds like a gaming card with extra RAM so it's kind of appropriate to call it a graphics card.

Or it will be cheap, with the ability to expand 8X on a server. Particularly with PCIe 6.0 coming soon, might be a very attractive package.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/storagereview_storagereview-a...