Intel Co-CEO Michelle Johnston Holthaus announced during their Q4 earnings call this evening that they will not be bringing their “Falcon Shores” AI / HPC chip to market. Falcon Shores was to be their next-gen GPU accelerator to effectively succeed their Gaudi AI chips. Instead Falcon Shores will be used as an internal test vehicle while preparing the hardware/software ecosystem for Jaguar Shores as its successor.
Falcon Shores is now designated as an “internal test chip” for working on their new software and hardware support in hopefully preparing for a more successful Jaguar Shores launch later on for properly succeeding the Gaudi AI accelerators.
While disappointing that Falcon Shores isn’t in a good enough state for going to market, it makes sense especially for providing the software ecosystem more time to evolve. Hopefully this will mean for a much more robust Jaguar Shores software ecosystem.
Intel traditionally has been very good with their software support at launch when it comes to Linux/open-source although we hadn’t seen any Falcon Shores specific code yet for the Linux kernel or related components. We also still haven’t seen any upstream Gaudi 3 support either… I was told last year Gaudi 3 support would come in October but that passed without any patches. As of Linux 6.14 there still is not any Gaudi 3 support for the upstream “habanalabs” accelerator driver. Hopefully by the time Jaguar Shores ships, there will be nice upstream open-source support in both kernel and user-space as well as being supported by key AI/HPC software codebases — ideally those prominent projects will end up receiving Falcon Shores test samples to help in early enablement.
Intel had been expected to release Falcon Shores in late 2025. At least we still have Clearwater Forest and Diamond Rapids hopefully arriving this year and the Linux hardware enablement there will underway.
