Intel Arctic Sound-M
Intel unveils its first next-gen data center GPUs.
The company has not said a word about Arctic Sound GPUs for many months, and that’s despite Arctic Sound being among the first discrete GPUs to be shown ahead of the Xe-HPC or HPG series. Today Intel has finally lifted the curtain on its new Data Center GPU codenamed Arctic Sound-M which unexpectedly features DG2 (Xe-HPG) GPU instead of Xe-HP.
Intel Arctic Sound (DG2), Source: Intel
Intel posted a video teaser that shows the high-end DG2 GPU with 512 Execution Units, which is actually the first confirmation of ATS-M leaks from Linux drivers. This is the rumored Arctic Sound Mainstream platform, which is clearly designed as a compute accelerator for server enclosures. It’s a passive single-slot design for server enclosures with no display connector. It is powered by a single 8-pin (EPS) power connector.
Intel Arctic Sound (DG2), Source: Intel
Intel claims that Arctic Sound-M features a hardware-based AV1 encoder that boosts bandwidth by 30%. If this is the case, then the feature might be exclusive to the data-center version of the DG2 GPU, otherwise, customers would have bought the Arc Alchemist series instead.
According to Intel Arctic Sound-M is already sampling and it will become available in Mid-2022.
Intel Arctic Sound (DG2), Source: Intel
Intel also confirms Ponte Vecchio is on track to launch later this year for Aurora Supercomputer. Intel claims 2.6x better performance compared to other solutions for ‘complex financial services workloads’.
The press release also mentions Falcon Shores, which appears to be an APU combining X86 architecture and Xe GPU cores. No further details are available at this moment.
Super Compute Roadmap and Strategy – More than 85 percent of the world’s supercomputers run on Intel Xeon processors. Building on this foundation, AXG is extending to higher compute and memory bandwidth and will deliver a leadership CPU and GPU roadmap to power high performance computing (HPC) and AI workloads. To date, Intel expects more than 35 HPC-AI design wins from top OEMs and CSPs. Additionally, AXG has set a course that paves the way to zetta-scale by 2027.
- Ponte Vecchio – AXG is on track to deliver Ponte Vecchio GPUs for the Aurora supercomputer program later this year. Ponte Vecchio achieved leadership performance results with up to 2.6x more performance compared with the leading market solution on a complex financial services workload.
- Arctic Sound-M – Arctic Sound-M brings the industry’s first hardware-based AV1 encoder into a GPU to provide 30% bandwidth improvement and includes the industry’s only open-sourced media solution. The media and analytics supercomputer enables leadership transcode quality, streaming density and cloud gaming. Arctic-Sound M is sampling to customers and will ship by mid-2022.
- Falcon Shores – Falcon Shores is a new architecture that will bring x86 and Xe GPU together into a single socket. This architecture is targeted for 2024 and projected to deliver benefits of more than 5x performance-per-watt, 5x compute density, 5x memory capacity and bandwidth improvements.1
1) Falcon Shores performance targets based on estimates relative to current platforms as of February 2022.
Source: Intel
