Intel enters the GPU market this year with its Arc Alchemist series, but that’s not the only GPU department the blue team is working on. Intel’s first ever data-center General Purpose GPU was presented by Intel Fellow & Chief GPU Compute Architect Hong Jiang at HotChip34.
Ponte Vecchio features Intel 7, TSMC N7 and N5 processes. It is built using Foveros and EMIB (multi-die interconnect bridge) 2.5D packaging technology. A single Ponte Vecchio features 128 Xe-Cores, 128 Ray Tracing Units, and 64 MB and 408 MB of L1 and L2 caches, respectively.
This GPU is also equipped with up to 128 GB of HBM2e memory and supports the PCIe Gen5 interface, the latest out there. There are also figures for compute workloads accelerated by XMX cores, which are part of the Xe-HPC architecture.
The GPU is built using 47 chiplets combining multiple architectures and nodes and is by far the most sophisticated GPU Intel has ever made, but the architecture has been pushed back numerous times.
Moreover, Intel claims that its Ponte Vecchio GPU is 1.4x to 2.5 times faster in some workloads Data Parallel C++ (DPC++) than NVIDIA A100.
There’s another performance metric in ExaSMR (Small Modular Reactors for large nuclear reactor designs). Here, the Intel GPU offers a 1.5x performance lead over the NVIDIA GPU.
Regarding TFLOPs, a 2-Stack Ponte Vecchio GPU configuration can deliver up to 52 TFLOPs of FP64/FP32 compute, 419 TFLOPs of TF32 (XMX Float 32), 839 TFLOPs of BF16/FP16, and 1678 TFLOPs of INT8 horsepower.
Intel’s Ponte Vecchio HPC GPU’s launch is long overdue. It was meant to debut with Aurora Supercomputer alongside Sapphire Rapids Xeon CPUs, the US first exascale supercomputer, however, it has had multiple pushbacks.
About Intel
Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, in Silicon Valley. It is the world’s largest semiconductor chip manufacturer on the basis of revenue, and is the developer of the x86 series of microprocessors – the processors found in most personal computers (PCs).
Incorporated in Delaware, Intel ranked No. 46 in the 2018 Fortune 500 list of the largest United States corporations by total revenue.
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