“Intel has officially taken the covers off its Ponte Vecchio, confirming that the first Xe-based dedicated graphics card will be aimed at high-performance computing and artificial intelligence stuff,” Roland Moore-Colyer writes for The Inquirer:
The headline-grabbing stuff is that Ponte Vecchio will be, the world’s first “exascale graphics card”, according to Intel, and will be built upon a 7-nanometre process node.
A 3D stacked chip design, courtesy of Intel’s Foveros tech, rather than a large monolithic chip as is the case with AMD and Nvidia GPUs, will be used for Ponte Vecchio. And thanks to the use of Intel’s X Link tech, systems using Ponte Vecchio can be scaled out to use multiple GPUs and nodes with unified memory, allowing for serious compute power to be put into high-performance computing machines.
There’s a good chance that a lot of the tech from Ponte Vecchio will then filter down into Intel’s work on consumer GPUs, which have yet to be revealed, but Tom’s Hardware reckons they’ll be built upon a 10nm process node and pop up in 2020…
MacDailyNews Take: Hopefully it trickles down from the upper realms of high-performance computing to Macs we can get our hands on sooner than later!
There is virtually zero chance that Ponte Vecchio will show up in consumer computers in 2020. Hell, Intel isn’t even shipping them yet. This was a typical Intel announcement. This is something that is likely to show up for HPC users sometime in 2020 or 2021. (Note: Intel does not have that 7 nm fab line fully operational yet!) It is a very complex set of chips and interconnects that requires very well tuned systems to operate well.
It won’t drop down to High End Desktop (HEDT) (what we used to call workstations) until 2021 or 2022. It then won’t show up in consumer grade computers until 2022 or 2023, if ever as the state of the art could easily change by then.Therefore it is asinine to predict that true Ponte Vecchio technology will be in Intel based computers for the average consumer to buy anytime in 2020.
Working my way through that specific keynote address yesterday did make Ponte Vecchio seem very intriguing and a direct answer to Nvidia in the HPC world. But the reality is that Ponte Vecchio is not quite there yet.
And, based on Intel’s recent history, we MAY see it actually ship in 2022 😉
On the plus side, by then we may have the mythical ARM based Mac with it’s superior reality distorted superiority. 🙂
Good grief. At least it is nice to read about.