Intel and many other tech companies have amassed against NVIDIA in a “War of Words” claiming that the green team’s AI success came from “Luck”. However, NVIDIA says that the company’s success is attributed to clear vision and execution which Intel lacked.
Intel Believes It Would’ve Been In a Much Dominant Position If They Could Develop The “Larabee” Project Halted a Decade Ago, NVIDIA Replies That Intel Lacked Vision & Execution
The whole fiasco started when Intel’s CEO Pat Gelsinger taunted NVIDIA’s financial achievements in the data center segment, claiming that the company’s CEO Jensen Huang got “lucky” with it. Intel believes that fate positioned NVIDIA & its portfolio of AI GPUs in the right place, and it had nothing to do with the contributions of Team Green to improve its AI arsenal. The statement is pretty controversial since Intel claims that NVIDIA’s triumph has nothing to do with the company’s efforts, rather it is just pure luck. Here is what Gelsinger had to say during the MIT broad-ranging discussion:
Jensen worked super hard at owning throughput computing, primarily for graphics initially, and then got extraordinarily lucky. They didn’t even want to support their first AI project.
Pat Gelsinger (Intel CEO) via Manufacturing@MIT
The interesting part here is that apparently, Intel’s CEO believes that if the company had continued its Larabee project, which was ongoing until Gelsinger left the company, and then later returned 11 years ago.
For those unaware of Intel Larabee, it was a project initiated by Intel to develop a highly parallel, many-core architecture. It was initially intended for the consumer segment, however, Intel shifted its focus and repositioned Larabee for high-performance computing (HPC) and parallel processing tasks. Team Blue didn’t see the AI hype a decade ago, but the Larabee project could’ve positioned them better in the markets.
I worked at Intel on Larrabee applications in 2007. Then I went to NVIDIA to work on ML in 2008. So I was there at both places at that time and I can say:
NVIDIA’s dominance didn’t come from luck. It came from vision and execution. Which Intel lacked. https://t.co/ygUJZIQWLH
— Bryan Catanzaro (@ctnzr) December 20, 2023
However, the twist of the plot here is that NVIDIA’s Vice President of Applied Deep Learning Research, Bryan Catanzaro, and a former Intel employee have revealed that Intel’s Larabee project and the whole idea of AI-accelerated computing lacked focus and execution from the firm, which is why it isn’t in the position the company could’ve been. Bryan reveals that despite having 10x larger revenues than NVIDIA, Intel at that time was unsure of what they were doing with Larabee, which ultimately had put them behind Team Green fast-forwarding a decade. With ongoing GPGPU and compute efforts, both hardware and software, NVIDIA conquered the market with no competition in sight.
It is common in today’s day and age where companies to throw words and taunts at each other, in an attempt to create controversies and shift consumer focus. Previously, Intel’s CEO disclosed that the entire industry is motivated to eradicate CUDA dominance in the markets.
NVIDIA has set the benchmark for AI computing in today’s world and controls over 90% of the market share. That has led Intel & AMD to accelerate their own AI developments to try to compete and take away NVIDIA’s market share. Both companies have announced and launched new accelerators but only the coming years will tell if NVIDIA’s dominance in the industry can be shaken.
News Source: PCGamer