[neilmovva]

A bit surprised that they're using HBM2e, which is what Nvidia A100 (80GB) used back in 2020. But Intel is using 8 stacks here, so Gaudi 3 achieves comparable total bandwidth (3.7TB/s) to H100 (3.4TB/s) which uses 5 stacks of HBM3. Hopefully the older HBM has better supply - HBM3 is hard to get right now!

The Gaudi 3 multi-chip package also looks interesting. I see 2 central compute dies, 8 HBM die stacks, and then 6 small dies interleaved between the HBM stacks - curious to know whether those are also functional, or just structural elements for mechanical support.

[bayindirh]

> A bit surprised that they're using HBM2e, which is what Nvidia A100 (80GB) used back in 2020.

This is one of the secret recipes of Intel. They can use older tech and push it a little further to catch/surpass current gen tech until current gen becomes easier/cheaper to produce/acquire/integrate.

They have done it with their first quad core processors by merging two dual core processors (Q6xxx series), or by creating absurdly clocked single core processors aimed at very niche market segments.

We have not seen it until now, because they were sleeping at the wheel, and knocked unconscious by AMD.

[JonChesterfield]

> This is one of the secret recipes of Intel

Any other examples of this? I remember the secret sauce being a process advantage over the competition, exactly the opposite of making old tech outperform the state of the art.

[mvkel]

Interesting.

Would you say this means Intel is "back," or just not completely dead?

[alexey-salmin]

Oh dear, Q6600 was so bad, I regret ever owning it

[tmikaeld]

I was just about to comment on this, apparently all production capacity for hbm is tapped out until early 2026