Intel Teases Ponte Vecchio Xe-HPC Power On, Posts Photo of Server Chip
by Ryan Smith on January 26, 2021 11:40 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- Intel
- Xe
- Ponte Vecchio
- Xe-HPC
In what’s turning into an Xe sort of day, Intel’s GPU guru and frontman for their GPU division, Raja Koduri, has tweeted that the company is getting ready to begin power on testing for their forthcoming high-end server GPU, the Xe-HPC based Ponte Vecchio. And along with this announcement, Koduri has also posted a somewhat redacted photo of the sizable chip.
Xe HPC ready for power on!
— Raja Koduri (@Rajaontheedge) January 26, 2021
7 advanced silicon technologies in a single package
Silicon engineers dream
Thing of beauty @intel pic.twitter.com/RF8Prsy05f
According to Koduri, Ponte Vecchio incorporates “7 advanced silicon technologies,” likely referring to everything from the four different process nodes used to make the chiplets, to memory stacks, and including the Foveros packaging.
Ponte Vecchio is a keystone project for Intel’s GPU division. Along with being the largest and grandest of their Xe GPUs, the chip will be at the heart of the Aurora supercomputer, Intel’s most recent supercomputer win. So a lot is riding on the chip, and no doubt Intel’s engineers are eager to see a successful power-on test.
Source: Raja Koduri (Twitter)
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JayNor - Wednesday, January 27, 2021 - link
wccftech has article, "Exclusive: Here Is Intel’s First 7nm GPU Xe HPC Diagram With Correct Annotations" which claims to have all the tiles correctly labeled.Their labels don't identify any of the visible tiles being xe-emf. They do mention that there is a base tile below. The implication is that the xe-emf logic is on that base tile. The 12 tiles just outside the compute tiles are said to be passive stiffener tiles.
repoman27 - Wednesday, January 27, 2021 - link
Ahh, thanks for the link. I had speculated in the comments section of the previous Anandtech article you cited that the XeMF might be the base dies of the Foveros stack. I don’t for a minute buy that those are Intel 10nm though.olivaw - Tuesday, January 26, 2021 - link
I wonder how many video streams it can encode at the same time! A million? No! Make that "a billion"!abufrejoval - Tuesday, January 26, 2021 - link
I wildly guess that I see 2 large CPU/SoC dies, 4 GPU dies and 2 HBM stacks.Dug - Tuesday, January 26, 2021 - link
So this is to take over Ampere in performance in late '21 or early '22?Don't they need a whole new software system too if they are starting from scratch? Never mind the training and learning a new system, which I'm not sure how many candidates are capable of.
I suppose when you are spending billions of dollars, you are bound to find someone.
mode_13h - Thursday, January 28, 2021 - link
Intel built their oneAPI on mostly existing standards and foundational blocks, so it's not from scratch. Also, it's a safe bet that things like their media SDK and OpenVINO support it as well. So, I wouldn't say the software portion is especially high-risk.olafgarten - Thursday, February 4, 2021 - link
oneAPI also has a CUDA backend, not sure how close it is to being production ready, but theoretically you can write oneAPI code and run it on a number of different systems.I imagine there will be a performance hit, but in some use cases, the portability may be worth more than a slight performance hit.
repoman27 - Tuesday, January 26, 2021 - link
Crikey, even if those are only 8-Hi HBM2E stacks, that package still has at least 116 dies perched on it.mode_13h - Thursday, January 28, 2021 - link
The best tease involving this GPU would be for AMD to tease Intel by showing the lights dimming when Intel powers it on.You're gonna need a desk-side chiller *and* fusion reactor for it.
Oberoth - Thursday, February 4, 2021 - link
Realistically we are looking at 2023 for this product and that's if everything runs super smoothly for them, surely then there is no way the rumours of Intel moving to TSMC can be true as it's claimed they are getting 5nm CPUs this year and most of Intel's CPUs will be 3nm the year after! It's going to look a little odd if the following year after that they suddenly go back to 7nm for something that is meant to be cutting edge!https://wccftech.com/report-intel-signs-contract-t...
https://www.techpowerup.com/277229/trendforce-tsmc...