Intel has ended the deployment of its Ponte Vecchio GPU, marking the end of the road for a chip that is considered to be a technical marvel.
Intel's Ponte Vecchio GPU was first revealed in 2019 and was the brainchild of Intel's Ex GPU guru, Raja Koduri. When it was announced, the chip was designed to power the next-generation exascale computing platforms but the company had to go through several hurdles to build this marvel of a chip that housed several chiplets on a single package. For reference, Intel's Ponte Vecchio GPU had a total of 47 tiles on a single package which included:
The Ponte Vecchio GPUs saw a house in the Intel Data Center Max GPU series and one of the lead products built on this exascale chip platform was the Aurora Supercomputer which did manage to break the exascale barrier but a little too late. The AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer not only managed to beat Intel-powered Aurora in the exascale race but currently sits at the number 1 spot and has higher peak efficiency than the Ponte Vecchio-powered system.
Intel did manage to break some AI performance records with the Aurora supercomputer thanks to its Xe hardware which includes dedicated AI accelerators but the company is now shifting the focus to its Gaudi accelerators with Gaudi 2 and Gaudi 3 now being the prime chips to serve the segment.
Talking to ServerTheHome, Intel confirmed that it won't be deploying further clusters with Ponte Vecchio GPUs. The company is going to continue to offer Ponte Vecchio in existing clusters but no new clusters will be made. For those who are interested in harnessing the HPC
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