Intel Provides AI-Accelerated HPC Update For ISC 2023

Intel is using ISC2023 this week in Hamburg, Germany to provide an update on its AI-accelerated HPC efforts. This includes reaffirming their upcoming data center product roadmap, reiterating their great software efforts, and also announcing full Aurora supercomputer specifications.

Much of their data center roadmap has already been discussed in detail previously. Most exciting on the roadmap in the near-term is seeing the 144-core (E cores) Sierra Forest next year along with Granite Rapids. Habana's Gaudi 3 hasn't been talked about much yet while Falcon Shores should be interesting for that AI-focused convergence.

Intel reaffirmed that Granite Rapids remains on track for 2024 while Emerald Rapids as a more evolutionary revision to Sapphire Rapids will be coming in Q4.

Intel showed off some big wins with Sapphire Rapids across many different workloads, but do note they are comparing to AMD EPYC 7763 "Milan" processors and not the very latest Genoa processors. AMD 4th Gen EPYC with Genoa having AVX-512 it's much more competitive in many of the showcased workloads.

Xeon Max is extremely promising for the 64GB of HBM2e memory with Sapphire Rapids. Xeon Max benchmarks will be coming on Phoronix soon.

A new disclosure from Intel today is that Granite Rapids will indeed feature MCR DIMM memory support for higher bandwidth at the same capacity as 2-rank RDIMMs. Intel is reporting up to 8800MT/s and up to an 86% peak bandwidth increase for MCR DIMMs with Granite Rapids.