Intel’s Gaudi HL2000 AI chip
Habana Labs, which was acquired by Intel in 2019, offers two series of products: Gaudi and Goya. The first is targeting AI training acceleration, whereas Goya is designed for AI interference.
At Wccftech one can find pictures of the new Gaudi mezzanine card featuring HL 2000 chip. Unfortunately, the detailed specs are not available at this moment.
This chip is equipped with 6 stacks of HBM-type memory, which could be either 48 or 96GB of capacity depending whether this is HBM2(e) or HBM3 technology. The processor is using OCP-OAM (Open Compute Accelerator mezzanine) form factor, which is the same type as its 2019-design HL205.
Intel (Habana) Gaudi HL 2080 AI Training Chip, Source: Wccftech
It is unclear what process technology is the HL2080 chip using, but assuming that the company was acquired by Intel, it is possible that it might be Intel own fab. Last year, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger highlighted that the company has a very aggressive path for Habana AI arm:
We also have, with our Habana product line [a specialized A.I. chipmaker Intel bought in 2019], unquestionably laid out a very aggressive path and our cloud partnership with Amazon is a great demonstration of that. So clearly, I’d say the idea of CPUs is Intel’s provenance. We’re now building A.I. into that and we expect this to be an area where we are on the offense, not the defense going forward.
— Pat Gelsinger, April 2021
Habana Gaudi HL-205, Source: Wccftech
The leak featuring HL2080 surfaces just days ahead of the NVIDIA Hopper architecture reveal at GTC 2022. NVIDIA architectures were oftentimes used by for AI acceleration performance comparisons. The release date of HL2000 is currently unknown.
Source: Wccftech
