NVIDIA Cries Foul on Intel Phi AI Benchmarks

This week saw the eruption of a vendor spat when NVIDIA, developer of GPUs widely used in the AI/machine learning market, alleged foul play against Intel in recent comparative benchmark results involving Intel's Xeon Phi processors. While NVIDIA makes some fair points about the methodology employed by its rival, Intel announced impressive news of its own on the AI/Xeon Phi front. First, let's look at NVIDIA's criticism of Intel that came in the form of a blog post by Ian Buck, vice president of accelerated computing, who declared that Intel compared Xeon Phi to out-of-date NVIDIA benchmarking data. "Intel used Caffe AlexNet (benchmarking) data that is 18 months old, comparing a system with four (NVIDIA) Maxwell GPUs to four Xeon Phi servers," Buck wrote. "With the more recent implementation of Caffe AlexNet, publicly available here, Intel would have discovered that the same system with four Maxwell GPUs delivers 30 percent faster training time than four Xeon Phi servers. In fact, a system with four Pascal-based NVIDIA TITAN X GPUs trains 90 percent faster and a single NVIDIA DGX-1 is over 5x faster than four Xeon Phi servers."