Oracle recently announced the general availability of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) bare metal Compute instance BM.GPU.H100.8 with 4th Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors, formerly codenamed Sapphire Rapids. As stated in this blog by Sagar Rawal, Vice President of Compute Product Management:
We have paired this NVIDIA H100 GPU-enabled server with two Intel Sapphire Rapids CPUs. This gives the server a total of 112 high-frequency CPU cores with a base clock of 2.0 GHz and a max turbo clock of 3.8 GHz to efficiently handle the preprocessing of AI training and inference workloads. The Intel Sapphire Rapids offers 4x the PCIE bandwidth and twice the number of PCIE lanes that were built into our previous generation. Time to market was of utmost importance to us. Intel’s Sapphire Rapids CPU aligned best with our development schedule and is highly performant to pair with the NVIDIA H100 GPU.
And Xeon has also been racking up AI proof points across numerous industry benchmarks and partner performance testing. Intel presented a live demonstration based on the Falcon 7B parameter LLM at Oracle CloudWorld 2023, leveraging key technologies derived from collaborations with Hugging Face.
“Intel is working with OCI to evaluate LLMs based on 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors,” said Jeremy Rader, GM of Xeon Market Readiness for Intel DCAI Group, “We look forward to extending our twenty-plus year relationship with Oracle and partnership with OCI to deliver the most choice on the world’s clouds.”
I am fascinated by the potential for AI and ML to transform business and society, and occasionally say interesting things about it. My educational background includes a CS degree, AI/ML post-grad work, and AWS certifications. I have served in AI marketing roles at IBM, Lenovo, and now Intel.