SambaNova announced the next phase of its collaboration with Intel: a heterogeneous hardware solution that combines GPUs for prefill, Intel Xeon 6 processors as both host and “action” CPUs, and SambaNova RDUs for decode to deliver premium inference for the most demanding Agentic AI applications. The design will be made available in H2 2026 to enterprises, cloud providers, and sovereign AI programs that want to run coding agents and other agentic workloads at scale.

“Agentic AI is moving into production and the winning pattern we’re seeing is GPUs to start the job, Intel Xeon 6 to run it, and SambaNova RDUs to finish it fast,” said Rodrigo Liang, CEO and co‑founder of SambaNova Systems. “Together with Intel, we’re giving customers a blueprint they can deploy in existing air‑cooled data centres, with broad x86 coverage for the coding agents and tools they already use today.”

“The data centre software ecosystem is built on x86, and it runs on Xeon, providing a mature, proven foundation that developers, enterprises, and cloud providers rely on at scale,” said Kevork Kechichian, Executive Vice President and General Manager of the Data Centre Group (DCG) at Intel Corporation. “Workloads of the future will require a heterogeneous mix of computing, and this collaboration with SambaNova delivers a cost‑efficient, high‑performance inference architecture designed to meet customer needs at scale, powered by Xeon 6.”

Agentic AI has moved from demos to deployments, as coding agents now compile and run code, call tools and APIs, tap databases, and coordinate workflows on fast, low‑latency large‑model inference. In the process, they are exposing the limits of GPU‑only stacks: GPUs handle prefill, but CPUs and dedicated inference accelerators now decide how fast and efficient real‑world agent workloads are executed, scaled, and optimised in production.

“We are seeing AI Agents code output grow exponentially and as a result, Daytona is seeing the need for more and more sandboxes to run and compile this code, which runs on CPUs like Intel's Xeon", said Ivan Burazin, CEO of Daytona, a secure coding infrastructure company for agentic AI.

"Production inference is moving toward heterogeneous hardware; no single chip type is optimal for every stage of an agentic workflow. What makes the Intel and SambaNova blueprint stand out is that it pairs reconfigurable RDUs for fast decode with Intel Xeon CPUs for agent tool execution, delivering premium performance with fewer chips and full compatibility with the software ecosystem enterprises already run on," said Banghua Zhu, co-founder and CTO at RadixArk.