Intel Says Memory Bandwidth Drives AI Performance More Than Compute
In a recent newsroom post, Intel is making a case that might sound counterintuitive in an industry obsessed with TOPS, TFLOPS, and ever-larger GPU clusters, but which AI enthusiasts and server operators have known for a while: the most important performance metric for many modern AI workloads is memory bandwidth, not compute.
Intel's Srini Krishna penned the "opinion" post, which argues that as AI models continue to grow, processors are increasingly limited by how quickly they can move data rather than how quickly they can perform arithmetic. To that end, Intel is touting support for DDR5 running at up to 8,000 MT/s on "select" Xeon 6 SKUs, along with plans to support 8800 MT/s MRDIMMs on Xeon 6900P systems next year. No word on exactly which SKUs those are, though.
The underlying premise is difficult to argue with to the point of being obvious. AI inference, and to a lesser...
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