It is celebrating the International Super Computing Conference and Intel has presented its bets for the server and data center market. If a few hours ago we told you about the successor of Ponte Vecchio under the name of Rialto Bridge. Now we have to go further and talk about Falcon Shores. The company’s first XPU that will combine both its Xeon cores and its Intel Xe GPUs in the same processor.
There is no doubt that one of the reasons why Intel has been interested in enhancing its ability to design graphics hardware is to drive the competition out of the market. This is especially the case in the high-performance computing market, where the use of graphics cards is key to solving certain problems. If we add to this that there is zero dependency on Windows in that market, then we have a situation in which Intel is attacked on two fronts. On the one hand, the growth in importance of processors based on the ISA ARM. On the other hand, a much more reinforced AMD in terms of GPU, which has allowed it to obtain several very powerful contracts.
What is Falcon Shores and what does the term XPU mean?
Well, it would be both the successor to the future Xeon and Rialto Bridge, and it is that at some point Intel will not offer its processors and graphics for servers in separate solutions, but in one. which they have codenamed Falcon Shores. being the signifier XPU the one used by Intel to talk about server processors that will integrate the functionality of a CPU and a GPU. So it is still the term equivalent to APU.
Since this has been going on for years on PC it shouldn’t surprise us. What’s more, it is the product of the transition to processors broken up into several chips, which we also usually call chiplets, which will allow these mixed systems. So it should come as no surprise to anyone that Pat Gelsinger’s company has made this announcement. What’s more, given AMD’s tendency to offer complete CPU and GPU solutions in one comprehensive package, it’s only natural that Intel would make the same move.
Intel plans for the time being to release Falcon Shores for data centers and supercomputers in 2024. What will lead to the product lines of Intel Xeon processors will be merged into a single product with the successor to Rialto Bridge. The safest in a hardware that is combined with HBM3 memory at the same time. Since it is the only type of RAM with the latency and bandwidth to serve as ideal memory for both a processor and a graphics card at the same time. Which will mean important changes in the nature of the servers, as well as their motherboards, since if so, we will have three key components of the computer in one piece.
