Top line
Shares of U.S. technology giant Intel rose in premarket trading on Tuesday after the company unveiled new artificial intelligence chips for data centers, an offensive that comes just days after rivals Nvidia and AMD announced their own products as the once-dominant firm competes for market. share of AI age.
Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger revealed details about the new AI chips and products on Tuesday.
Key facts
Intel shares rose 1.5% in premarket trading early Tuesday.
The rise comes after CEO Pat Gelsinger revealed details of a range of upcoming AI products at the Computex technology conference in Taiwan that the company hopes will help move the dial against its formidable competition.
Gelsinger unveiled a new line of Intel Xeon 6 processors for data centers that it says are more efficient and powerful than their predecessors, which were launched just six months ago.
The first of these sixth-generation chips, an “efficient” model billed as a replacement for older chips, is available on Tuesday, with a more powerful “performance” model designed to run computationally intensive artificial intelligence models and other tasks, according to Reuters. arrive by October.
Intel also positioned itself as a more affordable option for AI hardware, revealing that its Gaudi 2 and Gaudi 3 AI chips would be cheaper than competing products from competitors such as Nvidia.
Gelsinger said the prices look “pretty compelling” compared to Intel’s competitors, or “in other words, crushing the competition.”
Cons
In Taipei, Gelsinger took another shot at Nvidia president and CEO Jensen Huang, who argued this week that traditional computing methods can’t keep up with the “computing inflation” we’re seeing. Jensen, who co-founded Nvidia and is worth an estimated $100 billion, said that only by using accelerated computing tools like those offered by Nvidia will companies be able to keep up with modern computing demands. “Contrary to what Jensen would have you believe, Moore’s Law is alive and well,” Gelsinger said, referring to Intel co-founder Gordon Moore’s famous observation that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles every two years with minimal changes in cost. Effectively describing how computing power gets smaller, faster, and cheaper over time, Moore’s Law has basically held true for nearly 60 years, although many experts are increasingly concerned that it is losing relevance with today’s advanced technology. Gelsinger emphasized that Intel will still play a major role in the AI ​​revolution, comparing the transformation to the rise of the Internet 25 years ago. “It’s that big,” he said, adding, “We see it as the fuel that drives the semiconductor industry to reach $1 trillion by the end of the decade.”
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News Peg
Intel is a titan of the technology industry and has been a dominant player in the chip sector for decades, even as it has been overtaken by many rivals and has struggled to stay relevant in the increasingly focused AI computing space. Nvidia, now one of the largest companies in the world, has benefited enormously from this AI boom, as have other chipmakers such as Advanced Micro Devices or AMD, Qualcomm and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.
Tangent
Nvidia and AMD this week launched their own next-generation chips in Taiwan, the world’s leading hardware producer. Both companies have clearly targeted the computing-intensive boom in artificial intelligence, which was largely kicked off by the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT two years ago, as a priority going forward. Shares of California-based AMD and Nvidia were down between 0.5% and 1% in premarket trading on Tuesday.
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