Intel signals AI comeback with new chip launch next year

Intel said on Tuesday it will launch a new artificial intelligence chip for data centres next year, Reuters reported.

The chip, called Crescent Island, is designed as a graphics processing unit (GPU) optimised for inference and energy efficiency. Intel Chief Technology Officer Sachin Katti announced the product at the Open Compute Summit in San Jose. “It emphasizes that focus that I talked about earlier, inference, optimized for AI, optimized for delivering the best token economics out there, the best performance per dollar out there,” Katti said.

According to Reuters, Crescent Island will include 160 gigabytes of a slower memory type than the high bandwidth memory (HBM) used in rival chips from Nvidia and AMD. The chip is based on a design already used in Intel’s consumer GPUs. Intel did not specify the manufacturing process.

Intel Chief Executive Lip-Bu Tan has pledged to restart the company’s AI business after winding down earlier projects such as the Gaudi line of chips and Falcon Shores processor. Katti said Intel plans to release new data centre AI chips every year, in line with competitors including Nvidia, AMD and some cloud service providers.

The launch comes as demand for GPUs used in generative AI has surged since the debut of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2022. Nvidia has dominated sales for training and deploying large AI models.

Intel has taken an “open and modular” approach, allowing customers to combine chips from different vendors, Katti said. He added the company intends to keep its CPUs embedded in AI systems alongside accelerators such as GPUs.

In September, Nvidia said it would invest $5 billion in Intel, taking about a 4 per cent stake and becoming one of Intel’s largest shareholders. The two companies plan to co-develop future chips for personal computers and data centres.