Intel GPU . . . yes. . .Intel shared a photo of the biggest and weirdest GPU ever made through Twitter.
What are its potentials, why Intel calls it the “father of all” GPUs?
What has happened?
Intel has just posted a perplexing visual of an enormous socket-based graphics processor. No one had any idea whatsoever. What was it?
Intel’s Raja Koduri remarked the device as “father of all.” which he mentioned is an in-house name for the specific Xe GPU.
Intel Xe is an upcoming project series of GPUs that will encompass every market that you can imagine.
This graphics processor is extraordinary. From the outside, as you can see from the image, it is more looks like a CPU than a GPU. It does sit in a socket using around three thousand pins. It also has an integrated system of the heat spreader.
It looks like nothing we’ve seen before from inside. The chip is about 4000mm2, using the AA battery for scale. That is three times the size of an RTX 2080 Ti if the active area is half that size. The RTX 2080 Ti has under twenty billion transistors, whereas this GPU has “tens of billions” of transistors.
What sort of GPU is this one?
This processor eludes classification for the time being as the information provided by Intel is contradictory. Koduri said that the “father of all” is a Xe HP (high performance) product.
But later on, he would also mention this chip supports BF16, and a very niche AI acceleration compute format.
BF16 is an exclusive and confirmed, the feature of Xe HPC, which is high-performance computing. Therefore, this chip could be a Xe HPC product…
Silicon bring-up, with many tens of billions of transistors, needs surgical teamwork of various engineering functions. This was deemed impossible, until now, with only remote access to labs spread worldwide.
Baahubali is a mythical hero of sorts, and Baap means father in Hindi. Xe is being developed in India. The underdevelopment single HPC product is codenamed as Ponte Vecchio, and it is said to have 1024 cores. Leaks pin the core counts between 1024 and 4096.
The difference between the two is substantial. Xe HP is oriented towards workstations and gaming. Still, it is by far the most potent accelerator Intel is developing under its complex memory subsystem and the variety of centers and operations it supports. Xe HPC is optimized for AI, servers, and scientific work.
The nature of the HPC seems more suitable to the new mystery processor, while neither HP nor HPC can be ruled out definitively. It would be strange for a gaming and workstation processor to be prototyped in a socket-based format. Ponte Vecchio has been depicted in what may be a socket already.
From old schematics and presentations, Ponte Vecchio could be further expected to be unprecedentedly bigger due to the inclusion of the onboard HBM2 (or HBM2E) and high-footprint RAMBO cache. There is no reason to expect an HP product to be so large.
The Intel GPU “father of all” will undoubtedly have the mother of all price tags, so you’d better start saving, regardless of what precisely this GPU is. Xe HP will be released this year, and Ponte Vecchio will be ready in late 2021.