Computex 2024 Day 2 – Intel

Intel fights the battle of the benchmarks.

• Intel came out of its corner swinging taking on both Nvidia and Qualcomm in a keynote that was really all about how its latest processors stack up against the new upstarts.
• Intel was quick to refute Nvidia’s claim that Moore’s law is dead and if any of its data is accurate, there is some substance to this claim.
• This was on display with its latest data centre CPU Xeon 6 where eBay and SAP are supporting Intel’s claims.
• eBay claims that the Xeon gives a 25% improvement in performance per watt while SAP was able to squeeze out a 60% saving over the previous generation of Xeon.
• Intel also took a shot at the Nvidia H100 claiming that Gaudi 3 is 40% faster than Nvidia’s top-selling H100 processor and can deliver 2.3x the performance per dollar spent.
• The problem here is that the Hopper is no longer the benchmark as Nvidia launched Blackwell a couple of months ago against which Guadi 3 will be much less impressive.
• I suspect that Gaudi 3 will still be cheaper when it comes to performance per dollar when compared to Blackwell but this is also because everyone is so desperate to get their hands on Nvidia’s products that it can earn nearly 80% gross margins which is almost unheard of in semiconductors.
• Gaudi is a good option for the few that don’t want to use Nvidia or want to dual source, but it doesn’t have CUDA and as such, I don’t see it as a massive competitive threat.
• In AI PCs, Intel also came out swinging at Qualcomm which will be pretty gratifying for Qualcomm that Intel considers it to be such a threat.
• On the last two occasions that Qualcomm has taken a shot at this market, Intel didn’t even bother to acknowledge that the threat existed.
• It certainly seems to be the case that it is third time lucky for Windows on Arm.
• Here Intel claimed that the Lunar Lake CPU, GPU and NPU can all outperform the X Elite, which is credible, but crucially, Intel neglected to mention at what level of power consumption.
• Unlike its peers, Intel was brave enough to make power consumption comparisons against Meteor Lake, it said that Lunar Lake could achieve a 40% SoC power saving.
• Qualcomm’s test claims a 65% saving against Meteor Lake and so it’s a pretty safe bet that the X Elite will fare better on performance per watt.
• However, the question is how much and here there is no way to know until the devices get in the hands of consumers and testers and we see them work in real-world situations.
• Purely on the numbers if Meteor Lake is consuming 100 units of power, then Lunar Lake is claiming 60 and X Elite 35 implying that X Elite will still offer substantially longer battery life than Lunar Lake.
• It is clear that Intel is not going down without a fight, but Qualcomm is coming to market with Copilot+ PCs first and as such it is winning the PR battle against the x86 camp.
• Against Nvidia’s public presence juggernaut, Intel also faces an uphill battle meaning that this Computex has found other champions.
• Intel still has everything to do.