Stefan Mileschin

Big chip for data centres

At its annual Architecture Day semiconductor event Thursday, Intel revealed new details about its powerful Ponte Vecchio chip for data centres.

The chip is part of Intel’s cunning plan to take on Nvidia in the AI silicon market. Chipzilla claims it is the most complex system-on-chip or SOC to date with 100 billion transistors, nearly twice as many as Nvidia's flagship A100 data centre graphics processing unit.

Ponte Vecchio’s 100 billion transistors are divided among no fewer than 47 individual processing modules made using five different manufacturing processes.

Normally, an SOC's processing modules are arranged side by side in a flat two-dimensional design. Ponte Vecchio, however, stacks the modules on one another in a vertical, three-dimensional structure created using Intel's Foveros technology.

The bulk of Ponte Vecchio's processing power comes from a set of modules aptly called the Compute Tiles. Each Compute Tile has eight Xe cores, GPU cores specifically optimized to run AI workloads. Every Xe core, in turn, consists of eight vector engines and eight matrix engines, processing modules specifically built to run the narrow set of mathematical operations that AI models use to turn data into insights.

https://fudzilla.com/news/53420-inte...e-vecchio-chip