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When it arrived in January 2023, Ponte Vecchio was the most ambitious data center GPU Intel had ever developed. Despite its relative infancy, prodigious size, and power, a new report states that Intel has already alerted its partners that it’s begun the “sunsetting” process for the chip. This move will allow Intel to refocus its efforts in the quickly changing world of high-performance computing (HPC).
News of Intel’s plans comes from Serve the Home, which states Intel will be shifting its manufacturing capacity for Ponte Vecchio over to its Gaudi 2 and 3 accelerators—more of a direct competitor to accelerators from Nvidia and AMD. In addition, Intel will also streamline its HPC roadmap a bit by ditching Ponte Vecchio and pinning its hopes on Falcon Shores instead, due in 2025. Ponte Vecchio was designed for the Aurora supercomputer currently humming along deep within the Argonne National Laboratory, where it just became the world’s second exascale system behind AMD’s Frontier.
Intel was way ahead of the curve with Ponte Vecchio, but late to market, which ultimately probably contributed to its short lifespan.
Credit: Intel
Ponte Vecchio was first shown to the public in 2019 and was an unfathomably complicated design at the time. It features 47 individual chiplets using three manufacturing nodes: Intel 7, TSMC N5, and TSMC N7. All the chiplets are linked horizontally and vertically via Intel’s EMIB and Foveros technologies, making it a harbinger (at the time) of how critical chiplet designs would become in the HPC World. Due to its complexity, the production of Ponte Vecchio was delayed. Though it was initially expected to arrive in 2022, it didn’t ship until a year later and was originally designed to go head-to-head with Nvidia’s Ampere-based A100 accelerators. However, by the time it became a real product, Nvidia had its Hopper-based H100 accelerator shipping in volume.
Intel is pinning its AI accelerator hopes on its Gaudi 2/3 accelerators in the near term while planning for Falcon Shores next year. The company is likely hoping to gain a foothold in the burgeoning AI market with its Gaudi 3 GPU and then use that enthusiasm to propel Falcon Shores to success with customers next year. Intel had initially planned to launch a CPU+GPU “XPU” chip named Rialto Bridge to replace Ponte Vecchio in data centers in 2024 but announced last year it was scrapping that idea to focus on Falcon Shores as a discrete GPU product instead. Falcon Shores is rumored to absorb the technology in Gaudi 3 so the company can have one product line for AI and HPC, but Intel has yet to confirm it.