Intel updates HPC GPU roadmap: Rialto Bridge canceled, Falcon Shores extended to 2025
Today, Jeff McVeigh, Vice President and General Manager of Intel’s Supercomputing Group, released a new blog post announcing that Intel will cancel the follow-up product Rialto Bridge for Ponte Vecchio and change the release cycle of its data center GPU to every two years, with the next update not expected until 2025. Intel’s next data center GPU will be Falcon Shores, which was originally a hybrid XPU that fused CPU and GPU together, similar to AMD’s Instinct MI300 APU, and was supposed to appear a year later than planned in 2025.
Ponte Vecchio is Intel’s first exascale computing GPU, using Intel’s most advanced packaging technology to contain over 100 billion transistors, and is a culmination of Intel’s advanced technology to date. Rialto Bridge can be seen as an optimized and upgraded version of Ponte Vecchio, using a new process to manufacture modules that are compatible with its subsystems, maintaining software consistency. With this roadmap update, the Max series GPU will have only one product, Ponte Vecchio, at least until 2025.
Unlike the original plan, Intel Falcon Shores will first appear as a pure GPU architecture by 2025, which means that Intel’s product positioning has been severely impacted, not only changing the design of high-end data center chips but also pushing the timeline back significantly. Intel Falcon Shores is based on Intel’s small-chip architecture, which can integrate various IPs to meet exponentially increasing HPC and AI computing demands. With NVIDIA’s Grace Hopper Superchips and AMD Instinct MI300 both set to launch this year, it remains to be seen when Intel’s CPU+GPU solution will appear, which will lead to HPC products falling behind competitors for several years.
Additionally, Intel will cancel Lancaster Sound, a Flex series data center GPU designed for low-intensity work like media encoding, and instead, focus on the next-generation Melville Sound product for its Flex series.