“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!