In advance of Supercomputing ’22 in Dallas, Intel Corporation has introduced the Intel Max Series product family with two leading-edge products for high performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI): Intel® Xeon® CPU Max Series (code-named Sapphire Rapids HBM) and Intel® Data Center GPU Max Series (code-named Ponte Vecchio). The new products will power the upcoming Aurora supercomputer at Argonne National Laboratory, with updates on its deployment shared today.
What the Intel Xeon Max CPU Delivers:
The Xeon Max CPU offers up to 56 performance cores constructed of four tiles and connected using Intel’s embedded multi-die interconnect bridge (EMIB) technology, in a 350-watt envelope. Xeon Max CPUs contain 64GB of high bandwidth in-package memory, as well as PCI Express 5.0 and CXL1.1 I/O. Xeon Max CPUs will provide more than 1GB of high bandwidth memory (HBM) capacity per core, enough to fit most common HPC workloads.
- 68% less power usage than an AMD Milan-X cluster for the same HPCG performance.
- AMX extensions boost AI performance and deliver 8x peak throughput over AVX-512 for INT8 with INT32 accumulation operations.
- Provides flexibility to run in different HBM and DDR memory configurations.
- Climate modeling: 2.4x faster than AMD Milan-X on MPAS-A using only HBM.
- Molecular dynamics: On DeePMD, 2.8x performance improvement against competing products with DDR memory.
What the Intel Max Series GPU Delivers:
Max Series GPUs deliver up to 128 Xe-HPC cores, the new foundational architecture targeted at the most demanding computing workloads. Additionally, the Max Series GPU features:
- 408MB of L2 cache – the highest in the industry – and 64MB of L1 cache to increase throughput and performance.
- The only HPC/AI GPU with native ray tracing acceleration, designed to speed scientific visualization and animation.
- Finance: 2.4x performance gain over NVIDIA’s A100 on Riskfuel credit option pricing.
- Physics: 1.5x improvement over A100 for NekRS virtual reactor simulations.
Max Series GPUs will be available in several form factors to address different customer needs:
- Max Series 1100 GPU: A 300-watt double-wide PCIe card with 56 Xe cores and 48GB of HBM2e
memory. Multiple cards can be connected via Intel Xe Link bridges. - Max Series 1350 GPU: A 450-watt OAM module with 112 Xe cores and 96GB of HBM.
- Max Series 1550 GPU: Intel’s maximum performance 600-watt OAM module with 128 Xe cores and 128GB of HBM.
