Technology

The problem has always been software support. If Intel wants a piece of the AI pie, they need fantastic software support. AMD has always been a bit lackluster here, whereas Intel has done a pretty decent job in the past (esp. on Linux, their drivers rock), so they would need to double down if they truly want to get after it.

Actually AMD is pretty okay for running LLMs and other ML workloads. Many libraries now explicitly target rocm, you can just plop down vllm or the llama.cpp server and have it work with big models out of the box. There are some major issues (like flash-attention), but its quite usable.

Intel though? Their software is a mess. You have to jump throigh all sorts of hoops, use ancient builds of pytorch, use their own quantizations and such to get anything working, fix Python errors, and forget about batched enterprise backends like vllm. And this is just their IGPs and Arc, forget trying to use the vaunted NPUs for anything.

This could change if they actually had a cheap 48GB GPU (or a big APU) for AI devs to target... But they don't. And no one is renting Gaudi to build in support because its not even availible anywhere.

EDIT: oh, and one weird thing is the volume of Intel software support is high. Like they have all sorts of cool libraries, they make contributions to open projects... But its all disjointed and fragmented. Like theres no leadership or unified push, just random efforts flailing around.