Intel confirms ‘Sapphire Rapids’ and ‘Ponte Vecchio’ specs

During Intel's keynote at Supercomputing 2021, the company detailed more specifications about two of its upcoming data centre products, confirming some rumours about the Xeon Sapphire Rapids CPU and the Xe-HPC Ponte Vecchio GPUs.

During the keynote (via Anandtech), Intel confirmed that its upcoming Xeon “Sapphire Rapids” CPUs will pack up to 64GB of HBM2e, using four stacks of 16GB HBM2e each. These processors will consist of four compute tiles connected using EMIB and support DDR5, PCIe 5.0 and CXL 1.1. Rumours claim these processors will feature up to 56x cores and TDPs as high as 350W.

During the keynote, Intel also talked about its upcoming Xe-HPC Ponte Vecchio GPUs, which will be based on three different process nodes: Intel 7 for the base tile, TSMC N5 for the Xe-Link and TSMC N7 for the computer tile. The memory subsystem will consist of up to 64MB of L1 cache, up to 408MB of L2 cache and an undisclosed amount of HBM2e memory believed to be as much as 128GB. Each of these PCIe 5.0 GPUs will come with 128 Xe Cores and up to 128 raytracing units.

Both the Sapphire Rapids and Ponte Vecchio will be equipping Intel's Aurora supercomputer, which results from a partnership between Intel, Cray and the US Department of Energy (DOE). This computer will pack over 54,000 Ponte Vecchio GPUs and over 18,000 Sapphire Rapids processors, offering over two exaflops of peak computing performance.

Before finishing its keynote, Intel showed the roadmap of its datacentre products but did not share further details. Intel Sapphire Rapids CPUs and Ponte Vecchio GPUs are scheduled to release in 2022.

KitGuru says: With built-in HBM2e memory and large amounts of cache, Intel's new data centre products look to be very competitive. However, we should wait for third-party benchmarks before drawing conclusions.

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