Intel Ponte Vecchio to rival NVIDIA Hopper and AMD CDNA 2 in supercomputers

Intel has wanted to get fully into the segment of graphics cards, and Ponte Vecchio will be a family of GPUs focused on business solutions. We knew practically nothing until Pat Gelsinger showed the chip for this GPU, developed by the Raja Koduri team.

Everything indicates that soon we will know the direction of Ponte Vecchio, and that is that Intel announced that the Aurora supercomputer will equip this latest generation GPU. The ambitious project that has been led by Raja Koduri seems to take shape after the Intel CEO appears with this chip in hand, will everything be ready?

Intel Ponte Vecchio: 47 mosaics and 100,000 million transistors

Raja Koduri's proposal is to compete against NVIDIA Hopper and AMD CDNA 2, the generations of professional graphics cards from the respective brands. At the moment, the reference is NVIDIA, but Intel has wanted to get into this binomial in order to shake the hornet's nest and get its piece of the cake.

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger showed off the Xe-HPC graphics processor at the Intel Unleashed event, an event dedicated to manufacturing and the brand's roadmap. Intel has been working on Ponte Vecchio for more than 2 years, and the engineers have come up with functional silicon with a 47-tile design and a computing power of 1 exaFLOP.

Intel has confirmed that each of the 47 tiles equips more than 100 billion transistors, which is insane. However, what is Intel Ponte Vecchio? This is an advanced supercomputing accelerator to be used with Xeon's Sapphire Rapids architecture.

"The Blue Giant" has already announced the first supercomputer powered by Ponte Vecchio, whose name is Aurora and will serve the Argonne National Laboratory. This “beast” is expected to be finished by the end of 2021 and its potency will approach 1 exaFLOP.

Although NVIDIA and AMD have not presented Hopper and CDNA 2 in detail, the source suggests that Intel Ponte Vecchio will be an architecture that competes against the "Big 2" in graphics cards.

Do you think that Intel will excel in GPUs with Intel Xe?