NVIDIA’s Grace CPU, arriving in 2023, and is intended for niche applications in AI and medical science has been getting its fair share of attention lately. During the announcement itself, despite its data center orientation, has sent both Intel and AMD’s stock tumbling down by 4% on last Tuesday’s trading.
Based on ARM, NVIDIA’s Grace CPU hopes to compete in the data center and high-performance computing CPU space. NVIDIA explicitly detailed their vision for Grace but with its capabilities, is able to fit in to many other applications as NVIDIA hopes to see more datacenters populated by their hardware.
The server space is currently dominated by both Intel and AMD. This duopoly also extends to the client computing space as well and is the reason why many lay observers believe NVIDIA is intent on creating their own CPU or another product altogether that unifies their strengths as a company.
Fortune recently interviewed newly-appointed Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger where he talked about Intel, their position as a company and his views on the new developments from NVIDIA along with the potential for competition between the blue and green chip giant. Gelsinger postulates that Intel is a leader in the CPU space including AI acceleration and they are not playing defense but rather offense against NVIDIA. A quote from the interview with Mr. Gelsinger is below:
We announced our Ice Lake [server processors] last week with an extraordinarily positive response. And in Ice Lake, we have extraordinary expansions in the A.I. capabilities. [Nvidia is] responding to us. It’s not us responding to them. Clearly this idea of CPUs that are A.I.-enhanced is the domain where Intel is a dramatic leader. We also have, with our Habana product line [a specialized A.I. chipmaker Intel bought in 2019], unquestionably laid out a very aggressive path and our cloud partnership with Amazon is a great demonstration of that. So clearly, I’d say the idea of CPUs is Intel’s provenance. We’re now building A.I. into that and we expect this to be an area where we are on the offense, not the defense going forward. – Patrick Gelsinger, Intel CEO
