Intel has announced that it will launch a special fusion processor Falcon Shores, officially called XPU.

Recently, Intel reiterated at the ISC supercomputing conference that it is integrating its roadmap for high-performance CPUs and GPUs. It also announced its next-generation accelerator card Rialto Bridge with 800w power consumption.

Intel Falcon Shores XPU

Intel has said it will launch a roadmap later in 2024, saying it will significantly increase bandwidth, performance per watt, compute density and memory capacity. From the circuit diagram, XPU products may uniformly replace processors such as Sapphire Rapids HBM in the future.

The XPU is designed based on Tile and has very high scalability and flexibility, which can better meet the needs of HPC and AI applications. Jeff McVeigh, vice president and general manager of Intel's supercomputing group, said Falcon Shores is a "greater architectural" change that combines x86 and Xe graphics cores into a single package.

The XPU will use a chiplet approach, allowing multiple chips and different processor modules made using different manufacturing processes to be tightly packed into a single chip package. This allows higher levels of customization for CPUs, GPUs, I/Os, memory types, power management, and other circuit types. Intel will use advanced manufacturing processes and packaging technologies to support chiplet designs.

Falcon Shores XPU

The energy consumption ratio of Falcon Shores, x86 computing density, memory capacity and density are all improved by more than 5 times.

Falcon Shores will come with smaller tiles, HBM memory and network additives for various flavors. The flexible ratio of CPU, GPU, memory and networking capabilities will allow Intel to quickly adjust its Falcon Shores SKU for specific or emerging workloads later in the design process. Because the AI/ML landscape is changing rapidly. Intel hasn't specified whether customers will be allowed to mix and match to create their own favorite mix of tiles, but this would be a good fit for the company's Intel Foundry Services (IFS) approach, which will see It licenses its own IP and also makes chips for other companies. It's not hard to imagine that if the funding is suitable, other types of blocks, such as FPGAs or ASICs, could play a role in the design.

Before Falcon Shores, Intel will ship Sapphire Rapids' Xeon chips and HBM in the second half of this year. Ponte Vecchio's supercomputing GPU will be launched later, mainly for the artificial intelligence and high-performance computing markets.

Rialto Bridge coming in 2023

In addition to this, Intel announced the next-generation accelerator card Rialto Bridge. Intel cooperated with the U.S. Department of Energy to use its first accelerator card Ponte Vecchio to create a 10-petaflop supercomputing "Aorura", which is said to have a maximum performance of more than 20 petaflops.

Compared with Ponte Vecchio, the biggest highlight of Rialto Bridge is its upgradeability. It will use Intel IDM 2.0 manufacturing mode, with a more advanced process integrating up to 160 Xe cores, bringing higher floating-point performance and I/O bandwidth. It also comes with unspecified architectural enhancements, similar to the "Tick," running at up to 800W, boosting performance by up to 30% in applications.

Intel is a leading semiconductor chip manufacturer, specializing in x86 series of microprocessors. Intel acquired Altera and offers FPGAs a wide range of applications. Intel FPGAs provides configurable embedded SRAM, high-speed transceivers, high-speed I/Os, logic blocks, and routing.