Intel Gaudi 1 (Habana Labs 1st Generation)
Overview
Intel Gaudi 1 (HL-2000) is the first-generation AI training accelerator launched by Habana Labs (acquired by Intel in 2019). Released in 2020, it is positioned as a low-cost alternative to NVIDIA V100.
Core Specifications
| Item | Spec |
|---|
| Architecture | Habana Goya (training) |
| Process | TSMC 16nm |
| TPC (Tensor Processor Cores) | 2 x matrix multiplication engines |
| GEMM Engine | Integrated 8x 1024-bit MAC |
| Memory | 32 GB HBM2 |
| Memory Bandwidth | 1 TB/s |
| FP16 Compute | 270 TFLOPS (dense) / 540 TFLOPS (sparse) |
| INT8 | 270 TOPS |
| Interconnect | RoCE v2 100 GbE (10 x 100GbE ports) |
| TDP | 250 W |
| Interface | PCIe Gen4 x16 |
| Launch Price | $8,000-$10,000 |
Gaudi 1 vs V100 vs A100
| Metric | Gaudi 1 | V100 32GB | A100 40GB |
|---|
| Architecture | Goya | Volta | Ampere |
| Process | 16nm | 12nm | 7nm |
| Memory | 32GB HBM2 | 32GB HBM2 | 40GB HBM2e |
| Bandwidth | 1 TB/s | 900 GB/s | 1.6 TB/s |
| FP16 | 270/540 TFLOPS | 125/250 TFLOPS | 312/624 TFLOPS |
| TDP | 250W | 250W | 300W |
| Interconnect | 10x 100GbE | NVLink 2.0 | NVLink 3.0 |
| Price (Launch) | $8,000 | $8,000 | $11,000 |
Unique Advantage: RoCE Interconnect
- 10 x 100 GbE RoCE v2 ports (1,000 Gbps aggregate)
- Standard Ethernet, no proprietary NVLink required
- Multi-node training scaling cheaper than NVLink
- Advantageous for large-scale training clusters
Software Ecosystem
- SynapseAI SDK (Habana proprietary)
- TensorFlow / PyTorch (officially supported)
- ONNX (conversion tools)
- Performance initially below NVIDIA, but outstanding cost-effectiveness
Use Cases
- ✅ Cost-effective AI training (V100-class performance, half the price)
- ✅ Large-scale multi-node training (RoCE advantage)
- ✅ Recommendation systems / NLP training
- ❌ Inference (use Gaudi 2/3 instead)
- ❌ Mainstream ecosystem (PyTorch perf < NVIDIA)