Intel Now Shipping Ponte Vecchio And 4th Generation Xeon Processors To Argonne National Laboratory

Intel has achieved a major milestone today by announcing that its Data Center GPU, aka Ponte Vecchio (PVC) is finally shipping in blade servers to Argonne lab. PVC GPUs from Intel are based on the Xe HPC architecture and will be used to power the Argonne supercomputer to upwards of petaFLOP of performance. They are being paired with Intel's newly announced 4th generation Xeon scalable processors.

The Intel Ponte Vecchio GPU is a major product which has 128 Xe Cores, 128 RT cores, up to 64 MB of L1 Cache and up to 408 MB of L2 cache. HBM2e has also been used and the IO will connect up to 8 discrete dies. PCIe Gen 5 is being used along with Xe Link to deliver a tremendous amount of processing power. It is created using a mix of Intel 7, TSMC N5 and TSMC N7 packaged through EMIB and Foveros approaches.

Intel Data Center GPU (codenamed Ponte Vecchio) delivers petaFLOPS of performance, and together with 4th Gen #IntelXeon processors they form the brains of the Aurora supercomputer.

We’re excited to share that we are now shipping blades to @argonne. #IntelON https://t.co/kBnVNaVo2A pic.twitter.com/BrQqDCIKl1

— Intel Graphics (@IntelGraphics) September 27, 2022

There had been a lot of speculations that this particular contract might stand cancelled or that Intel would be unable to deliver on the contract with PVC (or even that PVC itself was canned) but this should prove all those rumors untrue. Not only is PVC alive and well, but it has finally started shipping to its intended end-customer - albeit a bit late. We will update the story if Intel reveals more information about this.