There is zero chance that Intel can add "good enough" functionality to their CPUs without changing their memory architecture. A high end i7 might have 35 GB/s of memory bandwidth. Even the biggest, most ridiculously expensive ($6000) Xeons have only about 100 GB/s. Nvidia's GTX 1080 has 320 GB/s. Their P100 has 732 GB/s.
The threat to Nvidia from Intel is in the Nervana chips they recently acquired. Those are presumably using HBM2 and could potentially beat GPUs for neural net training performance.
The threat to Nvidia from Intel is in the Nervana chips they recently acquired. Those are presumably using HBM2 and could potentially beat GPUs for neural net training performance.