Intel Takes on AMD and Nvidia With Mad 'Max' Chips For HPC

Intel's latest plan to ward off rivals from high-performance computing workloads involves a CPU with large stacks of high-bandwidth memory and new kinds of accelerators, plus its long-awaited datacenter GPU that will go head-to-head against Nvidia's most powerful chips. From a report: After multiple delays, the x86 giant on Wednesday formally introduced the new Xeon CPU family formerly known as Sapphire Rapids HBM and its new datacenter GPU better known as Ponte Vecchio. Now you will know them as the Intel Xeon CPU Max Series and the Intel Data Center GPU Max Series, respectively, which were among the bevy of details shared by Intel today, including performance comparisons. These chips, set to arrive in early 2023 alongside the vanilla 4th generation Xeon Scalable CPUs, have been a source of curiosity within the HPC community for years because they will power the US Department of Energy's long-delayed Aurora supercomputer, which is expected to become the country's second exascale supercomputer and, consequently, one of the world's fastest. In a briefing with journalists, Jeff McVeigh, the head of Intel's Super Compute Group, said the Max name represents the company's desire to maximize the bandwidth, compute and other capabilities for a wide range of HPC applications, whose primary users include governments, research labs, and corporations. McVeigh did admit that Intel has fumbled in how long it took the company to commercialize these chips, but he tried to spin the blunders into a higher purpose. "We're always going to be pushing the envelope. Sometimes that causes us to maybe not achieve it, but we're doing that in service of helping our developers, helping the ecosystem to help solve [the world's] biggest challenges," he said. [...] The Xeon Max Series will pack up to 56 performance cores, which are based on the same Golden Cove microarchitecture features as Intel's 12th-Gen Core CPUs, which debuted last year. Like the vanilla Sapphire Rapids chips coming next year, these chips will support DDR5, PCIe 5.0 and Compute Express Link (CXL) 1.1, which will enable memory to be directly attached to the CPU over PCIe 5.0.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.