Intel officially announced on Tuesday a successor to its flagship GPU with the code name Rialto Bridge for use in AI and high-performance data center applications, to sample to customers in mid-2023.
The news came amid a further commitment by Intel to build high performance silicon and software products that are energy efficient to help lessen the strain on the planet's gargantuan energy footprint.
Intel’s first GPU -- code named Ponte Vecchio-- was first announced in late 2019 and touted in February as outperforming its competition, which means major GPU companies Nvidia and AMD that have built their reputations on GPUs for gaming at the desktop and laptops and later for data centers. The first Ponte Vecchio is being implemented for the Aurora supercomputer program at Argonne National Lab later in 2022 and has shown up to 2.6 times better performance than leading GPUs, Intel has said.
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Rumors emerged in March of Rialto Bridge arriving in 2023, but now Intel has confirmed them. Rialto Bridge is set to sample to customers in mid 2023, according to Jeff McVeigh, vice president and general manager of Intel’s Super Compute Group. He announced the Rialto Bridge timeline in a keynote at ISC 2022 in Hamburg, Germany.
McVeigh used Rialto Bridge as one example of how Intel is working for expanding compute capabilities in demanding data center and supercomputing scenarios while also reducing power demands. Ponte Vecchio will have more than 100 billion transistors with up to 160 Xeon cores and 2 exaflops of peak compute power.
Beyond the time frame of Rialto Bridge, Intel envisions for 2024 an XPU being called Falcon Shores, a cross between a CPU and GPU that will run on configurations of tiles from Intel’s X86 group and the Xeon group.
McVeigh did not commit to any power efficiency improvements in his slides for Ponte Vecchio but did note that Falcon Shores will provide a 5x improvement in performance per watt, presumably when compared to the Rialto Bridge silicon. It will also have five times the compute density and five times the memory capacity.
Also at ISC, McVeigh announced XPU Manager, open source software for monitoring and managing Intel data center CPUs locally and remotely.
Sustainability at Intel
Intel’s theme of reduced power and better performance is shared with Intel’s recent commitment to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions within its own global operations by 2040. But Intel also has vowed to make the products it sells more energy efficient while more powerful, not an easy task.
Intel’s high performance computing roadmap through 2024 “will allow us to improve performance by orders of magnitude while reducing power demands across both general-purpose and emerging workloads such as AI, encryption and analytics,” McVeigh said.
He told reporters and analysts that Intel is on a pathway for “accelerated innovation for a more sustainable and open HPC and AI.” Across the computing industry, energy usage is “up dramatically, while [computing] efficiency has flattened out. We need to do our part.”
Intel and others estimate up to 7% of global energy production will be consumed in data centers by 2030, up from 1% to 2% today.
In comments to reporters, McVeigh said his Super Compute Group and he personally are committed to Intel’s net zero GHG by 2040. The overall goal was completed in discussions across Intel with the concepts for reducing greenhouse emissions brought forward to CEO Pat Gelsinger. “It was absolutely important do this, not just as an edict from on high,” McVeigh said.
Sharing his background as child growing up with a father in the oil industry for 40 years, he confessed, “I’ve always cringed, and lately, look at how much energy conservation there is. [Computers] are not that much more efficient than cars and we need to turn the mirror on ourselves and how we do better.”
The sustainability message goes beyond Intel, to the entire industry, he said. “We all need to lean into it. It’s not just a set of activists that just came out of college, but it’s all of us.”
Whether Intel meets its internal goal of 2040 for net zero will depend heavily on many factors-- not all under Intel’s control-- over the next 18 years, noted Jack Gold, an analyst at J. Gold Associates. “All manner of things can happen by then, but clearly if you don’t set a goal, there’s no way to ever achieve net zero,” Gold said. “The bottom line is that companies must set reasonable goals that they believe they can achieve and work towards those goals.”