Intel's Raja Koduri teases 'Petaflops in your palm'

by Mark Tyson on 25 March 2021, 10:11

Tags: Intel (NASDAQ:INTC)

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Intel Graphics boss Raja Koduri was stirred by CEO Gelsinger's Engineering the Future webcast, and wanted to share a sizzle reel of his own. Gelsinger briefly flashed the Ponte Vecchio GPU to the cameras during his webcast but Koduri's video reveals several import ant details of this flagship Xe HPC GPU.

Intel has been working on its own powerful discrete GPU products for about two years now, under the stewardship of Koduri and the graphics engineer and exec seems keen to boast that he and his team have successfully transitioned "from an idea to silicon in two years".

The particular success Koduri is talking about is the 'Alchemy of technologies' required to meld 'over 100 billion transistors' into '47 magical tiles' leveraging Intel's 'most advanced packaging' technologies to deliver 'Petaflops in your palm'. Quite an achievement.

The tiles in question aren't all GPUs, the advanced packaging has brought together logic, memory, and I/O processing alongside the GPU tiles, and some tiles are even made on different semiconductor nodes.

Intel Ponte Vecchio is set to be used in the Aurora supercomputer at the Argonne National Laboratory, being commissioned some time near the end of the year. Aurora will also leverage Intel Xeon Sapphire Rapids CPUs, a unified CXL standards memory architecture, Intel OneAPI, as well as Intel Optane DC persistent memory and connectivity technologies.

Intel slide from the Supercomputing 2019 event

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Posted by CAT-THE-FIFTH - Thu 25 Mar 2021 11:19
If Intel does make a viable set of gaming GPUs,I do hope they do a bit of their contrarevenue at the same time,to get AMD and Nvidia to sweat a bit. It seems both the latter and their AIB partners now are taking gamers for whales.
Posted by DanceswithUnix - Thu 25 Mar 2021 11:34
CAT-THE-FIFTH
If Intel does make a viable set of gaming GPUs,I do hope they do a bit of their contrarevenue in at the same time,to get AMD and Nvidia to sweat a bit. It seems both the latter and their AIB partners now are taking gamers for whales.

Why would they do that? The market will take absolutely any cards available atm.

The best thing Intel could do would be to produce a card that is utterly awful at mining, but decent at gaming. Not just a bit bad, AMD's 6000 series have a really poor hash rate compared to Nvidia's cards and yet still miners are buying the damned things. It would need to do 20MH/s at 200W to give gamers a chance to buy them. Availability would make for a lot of very thankful users right now.

Then ofc Intel have to have usable drivers. I've not used their integrated graphics in anger for a while now, so I don't know the current state there.
Posted by CAT-THE-FIFTH - Thu 25 Mar 2021 11:37
DanceswithUnix
Why would they do that? The market will take absolutely any cards available atm.

The best thing Intel could do would be to produce a card that is utterly awful at mining, but decent at gaming. Not just a bit bad, AMD's 6000 series have a really poor hash rate compared to Nvidia's cards and yet still miners are buying the damned things. It would need to do 20MH/s at 200W to give gamers a chance to buy them. Availability would make for a lot of very thankful users right now.

Then ofc Intel have to have usable drivers. I've not used their integrated graphics in anger for a while now, so I don't know the current state there.

Intel has done it in the past,especially with things such as the Ultrabook fund,when AMD only had BD uarch CPUs. Intel threw billions of USD at the Ultrabook fund and Atom contrarevenue. They did the same back in the A64 days.

BTW,you might want to see where the current CEO,Pat Gelsinger, was at Intel during his previous stint….he was head of the Intel Digital Enterprise Group from 1989 to 2009,which was the basically the CPU and server division. He was there when Intel did its dealings with Dell,etc to stop AMD from getting traction. Reading some of what Charlie of SA fame has said in the last 2 years,they are also doing some notebook “assistance funds” which is not helping AMD get into a lot of laptops.

Also why they would do it - Intel still needs to prove itself,and many gamers still will be wedded to Nvidia(and to a lesser degree AMD),and to increase marketshare in a market too wedded to the incumbants for dGPUs.

The fact is Intel only needs to price stuff at a slightly lower level(more like a few years ago),and offer contrarevenue deals to OEMs to displace Nvidia/AMD GPUs from prebuilt systems with Intel CPUs. No doubt,once they can get some traction prices will increase but its a viable way to gain as much share as possible.

The issue is Nvidia and AMD have pushed themselves into this corner,because both have been increasing prices upwards for at least the last 5 years. That has coincided,especially with Nvidia,getting record margins and revenue. The Turing price increases actually made Nvidia more money. Its the same thing what Apple and Samsung did - the Chinese companies came along and offered smartphones at more traditional price-points which are still profitable. Now,between them they have a bigger share of the smartphone market worldwide and can now compete at the high end too.

Also,unlike them both,Intel can see only added revenue from GPUs,but Nvidia will get more screwed if Intel shifts the market downwards a bit because at least half their revenue is from consumer GPUs. Intel can fight such a war,because they have very deep pockets.
Posted by lumireleon - Thu 25 Mar 2021 12:04
Cerebra does 1.2 Trillion transistors.
Posted by DanceswithUnix - Thu 25 Mar 2021 12:13
I just got a ping from a Discord channel from my hunt for a 5600X cpu a while back that a 6700XT was available. Whilst I'm not in the market, I thought I would take a look at what price it was going for.

Now I know it's overclockers, but they currently set it at £10000, which is like twice the value of my car (at least).

(edit: this says “Available soon” now, which is a shame as it was a funny placeholder and possibly a good way to mess with the bots).
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/powercolor-radeon-rx-6700-xt-fighter-12gb-gddr6-pci-express-graphics-card-gx-1a5-pc.html

Wonder if they will do a Dutch auction, just slowly drop the price until someone is daft enough to buy a card. They claim to have over 10 of them.


Anyway, I am quite aware of “Kicking” Pat Gelsinger's past exploits. It should make for interesting times ahead. But right now we just need a fair price.

Did you see the recent Linus Tech Tips piece on part availability? The card makers are claiming it is just demand, and he threw in this weird 30% more demand than manufacturers can keep up with figure that I would love to know how they calculated. In the mean time, I've been snooping around some mining threads and discord chats, and he's just flat wrong. Many people have happily been blowing £10K loans on even 3090 cards, basically anything they can get a hold of. Less typical and a bit more extreme, the Son of a Tech youtuber at the start of the current bubble went out and bought 60 5700XT cards to build mining rigs. If people see cards as money printing machines then they will quite literally soak up every single card made and want more. Gamers, well we can only use one card per rig and will run out of space for gaming rigs pretty fast so our market can be saturated, but we are competing against this infinite black hole of demand that can only be sated by the price of bitcoin dropping 80% again taking the altcoins with it.

The last bubble burst was messy, but I can see people either getting a console (like my son who at this point only uses his PC for college work and Minecraft) or even just taking up a new hobby.

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