A bridge too far, Intel axes Rialto Bridge HPC GPU
The company disclosed today it will move to a two-year cadence for its HPC GPUs, as a result, the already announced Rialto Bridge GPU will be canceled.
Intel today announced that the current generation of Max Series GPUs (Ponte Vecchio) will be the last of this type of HPC accelerator. The company will not provide an update to data center GPUs in this year or the year after, but instead will deliver an update in 2025.
The most important information is that Rialto Bridge GPU is discontinued. The next GPU for data center will be Falcon Shores, which is set to arrive in 2025. This means that no updates to the Intel GPU architecture will be released between 2023 and 2025, leaving the market to its competitors. This mainly involves the AMD Instinct MI300 and upcoming MI400 series and NVIDIA Grace Hopper, both series of products are to offer a hybrid of CPU and GPUs, or as some call it exascale APU.
Updated Intel HPC roadmap, Source: Intel/Wccftech
As confirmed by Patrick Kennedy (Serve The Home), the product Intel will release in 2025 will be a Falcon Shores GPU, with an XPU design featuring CPU and GPU elements coming later. It will also fuse memory into one package, by leveraging an improved Multi Chip Module design. It will be Intel’s new scalable architecture enabling flexible configuration of Xe and x86 cores. However, the primary focus for Intel is a large GPU design first.
Intel today also announced it will not launch Lancaster Sound, which was a successor to Arctic Sound M. Instead, Intel will launch Melville Sound, which was the successor to Lancaster, so essentially skipping a generation of GPUs. This again, moves the roadmap further.
Roadmap
With a goal of maximizing return on investment for customers, we will move to a two-year cadence for data center GPUs. This matches customer expectations on new product introductions and allows time to develop their ecosystems.
Building on the momentum of the Max Series GPU, our next product in the Max Series family will be the GPU architecture code-named Falcon Shores. Targeted for introduction in 2025, Falcon Shores’ flexible chiplet-based architecture will address the exponential growth of computing needs for HPC and AI. We are working on variants for this architecture supporting AI, HPC and the convergence of these markets. This foundational architecture will have the flexibility to integrate new IP (including CPU cores and other chiplets) from Intel and customers over time, manufactured using our IDM 2.0 model. Rialto Bridge, which was intended to provide incremental improvements over our current architecture, will be discontinued.
The Flex Series product family will also move to a two-year cadence. We will discontinue the development of Lancaster Sound, which was intended to be an incremental improvement over our current generation. This allows us to accelerate development on Melville Sound, which will be a significant architectural leap from the current generation in terms of performance, features and the workloads it will enable.
In addition to streamlining our roadmap, we are increasing our focus on the software ecosystem. We will be providing continuous updates for our Max Series and Flex Series products, with performance improvements, new features, expanded operating systems support and new use cases to broaden the benefits of these products.
— Jeff McVeigh, Corporate Vice President, Interim General Manager, Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics
Source: Intel, Wccftech, ServeTheHome
