But H100 is two to three times faster
Intel is trying to gain a foothold in the AI accelerator market through its Gaudi family of adapters. And already the second generation turned out to be quite successful. In particular, the Gaudi 2 competes with the leading Nvidia H100 in terms of performance per dollar in the new MLPerf v4.0 benchmarks, which demonstrate GenAI's capabilities in workloads such as Llama-70B and Stable Diffusion XL. 60~/p>
True, Intel itself compared, but at least these were not its own tests. Systems with eight Gaudi 2 accelerators and eight H100 accelerators were compared. The pure performance of the Nvidia accelerator is certainly higher. And many times higher. But the Intel product is much cheaper. And as a result, in terms of performance per dollar, Gaudi 2 sometimes even outperforms its competitor. Let us remember that the head of Nvidia recently said that even if competitors give out their accelerators for free, it will be too expensive.
Of course, even the performance indicator per dollar — that's not all that matters. There is also the cost of maintenance, energy consumption, versatility and software optimization, and so on. But at least it’s impossible to say for sure that Nvidia has no competitors at all.