I'll point out that this same argument applied to discrete GPUs when Intel tried to enter the market with Larrabee (before giving up and claiming that HPC was w

I'll point out that this same argument applied to discrete GPUs when Intel tried to enter the market with Larrabee (before giving up and claiming that HPC was where it's at anyway). "This time is different" might apply here though, because training is "just" a lot of low precision matrix math. This requires a lot less new ecosystem / software for Intel (Intel has a long history in matrix math), so much like SSE, AVX, and now AVX-512 (or as I still call it LRBni) Intel can easily make some tweaks to at least get 70% of the gains.