Pat Gelsinger, who succeeds Bob Swan at the helm of Intel, is a supremely confident man who says all the right things, and when Intel announced his appointment as CEO in February, Gelsinger said of Intel's quest for CPU dominance, "Our best Our best days are ahead of us," he said. But that was before Nvidia, the leader in the GPU field, announced its first ever CPU for data centers, Grace. Gelsinger also had some things to say about it.

"Obviously, the CPU idea is an Intel achievement. We are now building AI (artificial intelligence) into it, and we expect this to be an area where we will be on the offensive, not on the defensive," Gelsinger told Fortune magazine after a virtual White House summit with President Biden and various CEOs.

Indeed, the browser was once Microsoft's achievement with Internet Explorer, and while the use of the latest Edge browser is growing rapidly, Google now dominates the field. It's not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison, but you get the point.

Grace delivers up to 900 GB/s memory bandwidth between CPU and GPU via NVLink, facilitating advanced workloads with over a trillion parameters.

Nvidia believes Grace has the ability to "re-architect the data center" to advance giant-scale AI and HPC (high-performance computing). However, at least externally, Nvidia also acknowledges that Grace will "contribute to niche segments of computing."

Thus, in a separate Q&A, Nvidia answered the question of whether Grace is built to compete head-to-head with Intel's Xeon CPUs and AMD's Epyc lineup. [Nvidia continues to provide full support for all x86, Arm, and Power CPUs, and the Nvidia Grace CPU is designed to be tightly coupled with Nvidia GPUs to remove bottlenecks in the most complex megamodel AI and HPC applications. Nvidia states.

Meanwhile, Intel recently announced its third-generation Xeon Scalable Ice Lake-SP lineup for data centers, the company's first 10nm server silicon, and will follow with Sapphire Rapids. Both lineups integrate AI acceleration.

"With Ice Lake, AI capabilities have been tremendously expanded. [Nvidia] is supporting us. It's not that we're responding; the idea of an AI-enhanced CPU is clearly an area where Intel is a dramatic leader," Gelsinger said. [At least on the surface, Intel doesn't seem to be upset about Nvidia's move into CPUs for the data center. We'll see if that changes in a few years.