There was a time when Intel and Nvidia could stay clear of each other’s lanes more or less. That time is no more, especially with Intel entering the GPU race and both companies pushing forward with AI.
The new rivalry came to a head for Intel while announcing its new Core Ultra and 5th Gen Xeon chips at an event in New York City. Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger took an interesting jab at Nvidia’s CUDA technology. According to him, inference is going to surpass the importance of training for AI. He also questioned the long-term dominance of Nvidia’s CUDA as an interface for training, considering it a “shallow moat that the industry is motivated to eliminate.“ Ouch. Those are fightin’ words.
For the uninitiated, CUDA is short for Compute Unified Device Architecture, which serves as a parallel computing platform exclusively available to Nvidia graphics cards. Programmers can leverage CUDA libraries to tap into the computational prowess of Nvidia GPUs, enabling accelerated execution of machine learning algorithms. It is important to note that this technology is proprietary and not open source, despite having become something of a standard in itself.
On the other hand, industry players like MLIR, Google, and OpenAI are already moving toward a “Pythonic programming layer” to make AI training more open.
While Intel won’t neglect the training aspect, the fundamental focus lies in the inference market. “As inferencing occurs, hey, once you’ve trained the model … There is no CUDA dependency. It’s all about, can you run that model well?” said Gelsinger.
He also went on to introduce Gaudi 3 as a key component for effective inference, along with Xeon and Edge PCs. While acknowledging Intel’s competition in training, he asserted that the inference market is where the future lies. The CEO also spoke about OpenVINO, which is the standard embraced by Intel for its AI endeavors, and envisioned a future of mixed computing, with operations distributed between cloud environments and personal computers.
Intel might be onto something here. The adoption of AI is at an all-time high and the need for new methods to train AI is going to be crucial to save time and resources. It is too early to say whether Intel’s strategy is going to defeat CUDA. The fact that Intel’s newly launched Meteor Lake CPUs come with a built-in Neural Processing Unit (NPU), makes it clear that the company has its eyes set on integrating AI deeply into its products.
All this can get heady, but it’s clear that Nvidia has already become a dominant force in the world of AI, hitting the trillion-dollar status earlier this year due to its success in the area. Intel has been more on its heels recently, and even if Gelsinger’s comments were a shared sentiment among other players in the industry, the boldness to call out Nvidia directly felt like something only an underdog could have.
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.
I've spent a good amount of time digging into the spec sheet of the new M6 MacBook Pro (14-inch), and for all intents and purposes, this is a classic Apple "chip and connectivity" refresh. It's not a full redesign. The chassis, Liquid Retina XDR panel, speakers, ports, and battery, all of them carry over unchanged.
However, the M6 brings more cores, stronger on-device AI, higher memory bandwidth on the larger configs, and modern wireless. Here’s the practical rundown of what actually improved, and whether those gains are worth your money.