Michelle Johnston Holthaus, the CEO of Intel, provided information during the Q4 2024 earnings call that the company has decided to cancel the Falcon Shores chip, which was an XPU chip (CPU+GPU) for the server side. Holthaus acknowledged that Intel has not performed well in the AI server market, despite being a leader in the CPU server side. The company has the AI acceleration chip called Gaudi, but it is still considered to be in the early stages in this market. After analyzing the market situation, Intel made the decision to not release the Falcon Shores chip and instead move on to the Jaguar Shores chip, which will be the second generation XPU chip designed for rack-scale purposes. The Falcon Shores chip will be left for internal testing purposes only within the company.
Competitors in the CPU+GPU chip market for AI tasks include offerings from AMD, such as the Instinct MI300A (if the model ends with an X, it only includes a GPU), and NVIDIA with the Grace Hopper/Blackwell chips.
Source – Intel (PDF), Tom’s Hardware
TLDR: Intel cancels Falcon Shores XPU chip for AI servers and will focus on Jaguar Shores, while facing competition from AMD and NVIDIA in the CPU+GPU market for AI tasks.
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