Intel reveals Gaudi 3 price, and it's about half the cost of Nvidia Blackwell, Hopper

This week, Intel revealed pricing for its Gaudi 2 and 3 AI accelerators, which are extremely competitive compared to Nvidia's offerings. At the Computex trade show in Taipei, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger unveiled a pricing sheet, a rare event in the AI ​​world as prices are typically not revealed to the public. Gelsinger revealed that a single Gaudi 3 accelerator costs around $15,000, about half the cost of competing GPUs from Nvidia.

According to the slides published in X by analyst Jim McGregor, a Gaudi 2 throttle kit costs $65,000, including eight throttles in one socket. The same team in Gaudi 3 The model, again with eight cards mounted in a socket, will cost $125,000, so a single Gaudi 3 card costs approximately $15,625. For context, that's about half the cost of an older Hopper H100 GPU from Nvidia, although it's hard to know the exact price since they are sold wholesale and usually through private trade deals. Intel confirmed these prices too.

The so-called “Gaudi Wall 3” at Computex showed industry support for Intel's new artificial intelligence accelerator.
Credit: Intel/PCMag

The new base model Nvidia Blackwell B100 GPU also sells for approximately $30,000. according to Tom's Hardware, with the B200 CPU+GPU version for double, around $70,000 or so. The analysts had previously estimated The Blackwell B200 will sell for that amount, while cramming 36 of the dual-GPU variants into one case will require about $3 million. Intel claims that a Gaudi 2 kit is one-third the price of the competition, while a Gaudi 3 kit is only two-thirds the cost.

Intel claims that its Gaudi 3 accelerator is the only GPU that competes with Nvidia's H100 in MLPerf, a machine learning benchmark. Intel says its Gaudi 3 accelerator outperforms Nvidia's H100 in various AI and machine learning workloads, while costing much less, being easy to deploy, and using open standards like Ethernet instead of Nvidia's proprietary interconnects. . The elephant in the room is software, as Intel has to convince companies to abandon CUDA, a heavy lift.

Intel faces a sharp rise in its penetration of the AI ​​hardware market, as Nvidia is even more entrenched there than in consumer GPUs, where it is estimated to last up to a 88% participation. Intel expects to earn only 500 million dollars of Gaudi 3 in 2024: a drop in the bucket compared to the AI ​​windfall predicted by Nvidia.