I know we go on about Nvidia this and AMD that a lot when it comes to GPUs, and rightly so, but today marks the day that Intel has something to whet gamer's appetites. It's not a gaming GPU, I'll admit, but damn if it isn't a mighty good looking chip nonetheless: the Intel Xe HPC GPU, codename 'Ponte Vecchio', fresh off the conveyor belt and ready for power on.
Xe HPC ready for power on! 7 advanced silicon technologies in a single packageSilicon engineers dreamThing of beauty @intel pic.twitter.com/RF8Prsy05fJanuary 26, 2021
It's quite the package, as you can see. There are two discrete 'Base' chiplets, or what Intel would prefer to call 'tiles', making up the GPU's core. These likely contain 512 EUs a piece, for 1024 EUs in total, but we're yet to hear the final loadout from Intel directly.
Surrounding each of those are five tiles of varying sizes. At least four are sure to be HBM memory, those on the left-hand side of the GPU look like they fit the bill to me, while those remaining are a mix of 'Compute', 'Rambo Cache', and 'I/O'.
As a datacentre part, and destined for the Aurora Supercomputer, overall bandwidth is sure to be colossal.
Some of those tiles will be manufactured on Intel 10nm SuperFin, Enhanced SuperFin, 'Next Gen' (presumably 7nm), and external foundry nodes.
All of which is tied together using Intel's Embedded Multi-die Interconnect Bridge technology, or EMIB for short, and Intel's chip-stacking Foveros technology.
So there's sure to be more than meets the eye here.
More than anything else, however, it's an absolute stunner. Even if it's not destined for our gaming PCs—that's coming with Xe-HPG in the future—it's good to see a brand new GPU with a little mystery in 2021.
Good job, Intel.
