At this point why can't someone produce a fridge or container-sized AI appliance based on legacy chips (12nm)? I imagine this would cover 80% of corporate use cases where you need to "google-in-a-box" functionality.
The state-of-the-art nanometer are impossible to achieve but if you have infinite solar energy during business hours does it really matter? Every company has a parking spot so this ASIC-like appliance could be as big as a shipping container.
If it could just run recent open models for a handful of users it would be such a nobrainer to buy.
See "exabox" from George Hotz: https://tinycorp.myshopify.com/products/exabox-preorder
No one's buying that shitbox.
Why?
Nvidia is already selling exactly this I think, not sure when it's expected to ship
The issue is that there are only so many fabs in the world that make memory. And if you want the good stuff, your easily going into 400 ~ 750b parameter models. That means at FP4 400 to 750GB memory.
Did i mention there are only so many memory makers and they are all busy printing money with HBM memory?
Intel is trying with Crescent Island, to make a 160GB GPU that uses LPDDR5X memory.
HBM takes multiple times the resources to make vs basic DDR5 memory. So by going this route, you have more memory, with the disadvantage that its only 700GB/s. VS HBM pumping out Terrabyte numbers like its nothing.
These cards is reasonably priced, may be good alternative to $10k 96GB Nvidia Blackwells... You give up on token generation (heavily memory dependent), for more memory to run larger models at home/office/company servers.
The problem is, again, there are only so many memory makers and its not like the market is flooded with DDR5 memory anymore, as the big 3 moved a lot of production to HBM.
Another approach is Sandisk making HBF ... Flash memory, like your typical NVME but designed around maximum speed. So instead of loading the models into expensive HBM memory, you use the benefits of density in Flash memory, to offload models into that. Cheaper, but slower... But it leaves your expensive HBM memory free for things like KV Cache, Active parameters, etc... So your model will be slower, but your hybrid using it. As in, faster then running a model from system memory with normal DDR memory, but not as fast as HBM.
So yea, there is a lot in development to reduce the dependance of that resource eating HBM memory. For the wafer cost of 1GB HBM, you normally got 4GB normal memory. That is why the world supply of memory dropped. Not just the insane buying but be HBM is just very inefficient in wafer usage.
Can we not use DDR4 production and create some kind of hybrid solution? Sure, but the big 3 moved away from DDR4 in favor of DDR5 a long time ago. We have competition from China with a mix of DDR4/DDR5, but they also need to scale up. Nobody expected to see a large part of the world production vanish into HBM...
Even if its about DDR4 and older nodes, ironically, most companies had been moving away from DDR4. There is only so much wafer capability in the world, to the point that companies are moving to using DDR2 ... Yea, not a typo, like 2007 DDR2! for IOT devices etc, stuff that does not need fast memory. Because even DDR3 got too expensive for them.
Its not like the old nodes are not used anymore ... Like that capacity was sitting idle. It was still in production making other stuff. The only real solution is that we need more fabs, and those take years to build. And the big 3 delayed investing in new fabs for a long time, unsure about the whole AI bubble stuff. Aka, they did not want to make a ton of fabs to end up with over capacity if the AI growth collapsed.
With MoE models like Deepseek’s and with multiple Crescent Island accelerators, the aggregate memory throughput actually doesn’t look that bad. Two Crescent Island gets roughly 1400GB/s and Deepseek-v4-flash with 13B parameters active nets roughly 100t/s which is decent for a small team or great for a single user.
More Crescent Island scale up, although not likely entirely linearly.
But all GPU inference work like this, it’s not specific to Intel. Just Intel promises more affordable cards with big memory so they’re attractive.