It Takes Two to Samba: Intel's Nova Partner for Heterogeneous Inference

Intel and SambaNova partner on AI inference, combining GPUs, RDUs, and Xeon CPUs in a heterogeneous design aimed at agentic AI workloads.

Intel and SambaNova announced a multi-year strategic partnership to deliver high-performance AI inference solutions, marking Intel's key effort to regain its position in the AI chip market. The collaboration, unveiled on April 8, 2026, features a "heterogeneous inference” design that combines GPUs for prefill, SambaNova's Reconfigurable Dataflow Units (RDUs) for high-throughput decoding, and Intel Xeon 6 processors as host and CPU units for agentic AI tasks. Agentic AI exposes the limitations of GPU‑only stacks, emphasizing that each stage of the pipeline is crucial, and indicates that the era of GPU-only inference is ending.