Today, MLCommons published results of its industry AI performance benchmark in which both the 4th Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processor (code-named Sapphire Rapids) and Habana Gaudi 2 dedicated deep learning accelerator logged impressive training results.


"I'm proud of our team's continued progress since we last submitted leadership results on MLPerf in June. Intel's 4th gen Xeon Scalable processor and Gaudi 2 AI accelerator support a wide array of AI functions and deliver leadership performance for customers who require deep learning training and large-scale workloads." Sandra Rivera, Intel executive vice president and general manager of the Datacenter and AI Group

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.

The Xeon Max CPU is the first and only x86-based processor with high bandwidth memory, accelerating many HPC workloads without the need for code changes. The Max Series GPU is Intel's highest density processor, packing over 100 billion transistors into a 47-tile package with up to 128 gigabytes (GB) of high bandwidth memory. The oneAPI open software ecosystem provides a single programming environment for both new processors. Intel's 2023 oneAPI and AI tools will deliver capabilities to enable the Intel Max Series products' advanced features.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE: HPE) today announced it is making supercomputing accessible for more enterprises to harness insights, solve problems and innovate faster by delivering its world-leading, energy-efficient supercomputers in a smaller form factor and at a lower price point.

The expanded portfolio includes new HPE Cray EX and HPE Cray XD supercomputers, which are based on HPE's exascale innovation that delivers end-to-end, purpose-built technologies in compute, accelerated compute, interconnect, storage, software, and flexible power and cooling options. The supercomputers provide significant performance and AI-at-scale capabilities to tackle demanding, data-intensive workloads, speed up AI and machine learning initiatives, and accelerate innovation to deliver products and services to market faster.

Intel Corporation today reported third-quarter 2022 financial results. "Despite the worsening economic conditions, we delivered solid results and made significant progress with our product and process execution during the quarter," said Pat Gelsinger, Intel CEO. "To position ourselves for this business cycle, we are aggressively addressing costs and driving efficiencies across the business to accelerate our IDM 2.0 flywheel for the digital future."

"As we usher in the next phase of IDM 2.0, we are focused on embracing an internal foundry model to allow our manufacturing group and business units to be more agile, make better decisions and establish a leadership cost structure," said David Zinsner, Intel CFO. "We remain committed to the strategy and long-term financial model communicated at our Investor Meeting."

Intel Arc A770 "Alchemist" graphics card has an idle power-draw problem. It pulls 44 W (card-only) power when idling. This used to be acceptable some 15 years ago, but GPU idle power-draw has come a long way since. The reigning Goliath GeForce RTX 4090 pulls just 21 W when idling, and the RTX 3070, the card the A770 was extensively compared against, only pulls 9 W—that's 7 LED downlights worth power-difference between the A770 and RTX 3070. Intel has a workaround to this problem: enable the PCI-Express active state power management (ASPM) setting to L1 mode in your motherboard's UEFI BIOS setup program.

The Intel Xe-HPG "Alchemist" graphics architecture reportedly uses PCIe Gen 2-era L0 and L1 ASPM, which needs to be forced via software settings. To do this, find the PCIe ASPM settings in your BIOS setup, and enable them with the "L1" setting. You then make your way to Power Options in the Windows Control Panel, edit your active power scheme, and manually set the PCI-Express "Link state power-management" to "Maximum." This affects the power-management behavior and performance of all PCIe devices in your system, including NVMe SSDs, not just the graphics card. Intel did not put out its power-draw numbers for this workaround, but we intend to test it as soon as we can.

We're excited to release a new 3DMark feature test for Intel's new XeSS AI-enhanced upscaling technology. This new feature test is available in 3DMark Advanced and Professional Editions. 3DMark feature tests are special tests designed to highlight specific techniques, functions, or capabilities. The Intel XeSS feature test shows you how XeSS affects performance.

The 3DMark Intel XeSS frame inspector tool helps you compare image quality with an interactive side-by-side comparison of XeSS and native-resolution rendering. Check out the images below to see an example comparison of native resolution rendering and XeSS in the new 3DMark feature test.

The Intel Arc 7-series performance-segment graphics cards announced earlier this week, are all priced within $60 of each other. The series begins with the Arc A750 at USD $289. $40 more gets you the Arc A770 Limited Edition 8 GB, at $329. The top-of-the-line Arc A770 Limited Edition 16 GB is priced just $20 higher, at $349. This puts the Intel flagship at least $30 less than the cheapest NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 available in the market right now, which can be had for $380. The dark horse here is the AMD Radeon RX 6650 XT, which is going for as low as $320.

Intel extensively compared the A770 to the RTX 3060 in its marketing materials, focusing on how its ray tracing performance is superior to even that of NVIDIA RTX in this segment, and that the Intel XeSS performance enhancement is technologically on-par with 2nd generation super-scaling techs such as FSR 2.0 and DLSS 2. If Intel's performance claims hold, the A770 has the potential to beat both the RTX 3060 and RX 6650 XT in its segment. The Arc A750, A770 8 GB, and A770 16 GB, go on sale from October 12. Stay tuned for our reviews.

Intel's ambitious XeSS (Xe Super Sampling) performance enhancement formally launched, with the latest "Shadow of the Tomb Raider" patch dated September 27. The patch release notes describes this feature addition as "Added XeSS graphics support for DX12-compatible systems." This means that XeSS not only works in its native XMX code-path for Arc "Alchemist" GPUs, but also the agnostic DP4a code. CapFrameX confirmed that XeSS works with Radeon RX 6000 RDNA2 GPUs, which means the DP4a fallback has been implemented. The XeSS feature-addition to SoTR comes just in time as reviews of the Arc A770 are expected to go live early next month, with availability slated for October 12. You can learn more about XeSS in our older article.

QNAP Systems, Inc., a leading computing, networking, and storage solution innovator, today launched reliable QuTS hero NAS TS-hx87XU-RP series, available in 9, 18, 22, and 30-bay models. The series integrates the power of Intel Xeon E-2300 series processors with fast 10GbE and 2.5GbE Multi-Gig connectivity and an efficient HDD/SSD hybrid storage architecture that balances performance, capacity, and cost. Running the ZFS-based QuTS hero operating system, the TS-hx87XU-RP series prioritizes data integrity and provides powerful data reduction, near-limitless snapshots, up to 5 petabytes capacity per shared folder, and more, serving as ideal storage solution that meets today's business requirements for file servers, virtualization servers, VDI, and backup/restore.

Designed for heavy business workloads, the TS-hx87XU-RP has extreme computing power from the Intel Xeon E processor, along with up to 128 GB DDR4 ECC memory to fuel multitasking demands and redundant power supply protection. In-built 10GBASE-T and 2.5 GbE network ports fulfill bandwidth-demanding tasks such as virtualization, large file transfers, and real-time applications. High-speed PCIe Gen 4 slots are included for extending core NAS functionality, such as adding additional 10/25 GbE network interface cards, QM2 cards to add M.2 SSDs and 2.5 GbE/10GbE ports, Fibre Channel cards for SAN storage, and storage expansion cards to connect QNAP expansion enclosures. The TS-hx87XU-RP series can pair with QNAP's managed and unmanaged 10GbE/2.5 GbE switches, assisting organizations in implementing high-speed, secure and scalable network environments without going over budget.

The U.S. Government has imposed restrictions on the export of AI compute GPUs to China and Russia without Government-authorization in the form of a waiver or a license. This impacts sales of products such as the NVIDIA A100, H100; AMD Instinct MI100, MI200; and the upcoming Intel "Ponte Vecchio," among others. The restrictions came to light when NVIDIA on Wednesday disclosed that it has received a Government notification about licensing requirements for export of its AI compute GPUs to Russia and China.

The notification doesn't specify the A100 and H100 by name, but defines AI inference performance thresholds to meet the licensing requirements. The Government wouldn't single out NVIDIA, and so competing products such as the AMD MI200 and the upcoming Intel Xe-HP "Ponte Vecchio" would fall within these restrictions. For NVIDIA, this is impacts $400 million in TAM, unless the Government licenses specific Russian and Chinese customers to purchase these GPUs from NVIDIA. Such trade restrictions usually come with riders to prevent resale or transshipment by companies outside the restricted region (eg: a distributor in a third waived country importing these chips in bulk and reselling them to these countries).

DFI, the global leading provider of high-performance computing technology across multiple embedded industries, unveils a server-grade ATX motherboard, designed for Intel Ice Lake platform, powered by the 3rd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors, and equipped with ultra-high speed computing that can support up to 205 W. ICX610-C621A also comes with built-in Intel Speed Select Technology (Intel SST), which provides an excellent load balancing between CPUs and multiple accelerator cards to effectively distribute CPU resource, stabilize computation loads and maximize computing power. As a result, it improves the performance by 1.46 times compared to previous generation.

Featuring powerful performance, the offers three PCIe x16, two PCIe x8 slots and one M.2 Key and enables ultra-performance computing, AI workload and deep learning, specifically for high-end inspection equipment, such as AOI, CT, and MRI application. The ICX610 also supports ECC RDIMM up to 512 GB 3200 MHz, enhances high end performance for advanced inspection equipment and improves efficiency.

Intel's future Meteor Lake APUs seem to be playing catch-up to AMD's integrated graphics in more ways than one. Twitter user Coelacanth's Dream has dug up information that indicates Intel's commitment to bring ray tracing support to even its IGP (Integrated Graphics Processing) tiles. According to bits and pieces from Intel Graphics Compiler (IGC) code patches, it seems to be confirmed that ray tracing support is indeed coming to the TSMC-made, 3 nm GPU tiles in Meteor Lake. The kicker here is the presence of flags that detect whether the iGPU is of the "iGFX_meteorlake" type - if so, IGC sets ray tracing support to enabled.

Puzzlingly, Intel's upscaling technology, Xe SuperSampling (XeSS) could be out of the picture - at least for now. It seems that IGC patches for the upcoming APU family still don't allow for DPAS (Dot Product Accumulate Systolic) instructions - instructions that rely on XMX (Intel Xe Matrix Extensions), the AI engines responsible for executing 128 FP16/BF16, 256 INT8, or 512 INT4/INT2 operations per clock. These low-precision operations are the soul of algorithmic supersampling technologies such as XeSS.

AIC Inc., (from now on referred to as "AIC"), a leading provider in enterprise storage and server solutions, today announced its new product family of mainstream dual socket storage servers. Powered by 3rd Gen. Intel Xeon Scalable processors, these rackmount storage servers are high-performance and designed with high flexibility to support various storage devices. This new product family provides options ranging from cost-efficiency servers to high performance all-flash NVMe platforms and can fulfill wide range of data storage applications from storage tiering, virtualization to cloud datacenters and high performance computing (HPC).

This new product family includes three models, SB101-A6, SB202-A6 and SB201-A6. These dual socket server systems are with AIC server board (codename: A6) that is based on 3rd Gen. Intel Xeon Scalable processors. By leveraging 3rd Gen. Intel Xeon Scalable processors 'great features, including CPU TDP supports up to 270 W, DDR4 memory, PCIe Gen4 ready, built-in AI and enhanced security, the new server systems provide excellent performances and low latency while maintaining the cost-effective benefits. Customers can utilize the enhanced Intel CPU performances, memory capabilities and doubled PCIe Gen4 I/O bandwidth to tackle the challenges in data storage workloads. Besides, the new server systems are designed with universal (tri-mode) backplanes and are able to support SAS, SATA, and NVMe, providing great flexibility for customers to load either 3.5"or 2.5" HDDs/SSDs. With tool-less features, the new server systems can save operators significant amount of maintenance resources, which is crucial for hyper-scaler and cloud environments.

Intel and Google are working together to drive high performance computing (HPC) forward on Google Cloud with the release of the Cloud HPC Toolkit. This new resource provides access to tools from the Intel oneAPI Base and HPC Toolkits to optimize performance through Intel Select Solutions for Simulations & Modeling. These new tools improve compile times, speed of results and offer multi-vendor acceleration in SYCL.

"Using Cloud HPC Toolkit with an Intel Select Solutions for Simulations & Modeling blueprint brings the added benefit of automatically spinning up a hardware-software configuration that has been rigorously tested and optimized for real-world performance, eliminating guesswork," said Ilias Katsardis, HPC solution lead, Google.

Simply NUC, Inc, a leading mini PC integration company, announces we are taking orders for our new Topaz 2 NUC. As the successor to the first generation Topaz, Topaz 2 is the first available NUC to be powered by Intel's latest 12th Gen Core processors. From home office to digital signage, Topaz 2 is designed to be used across a wide range of computing applications. Offering up to 12 cores and 16 threads paired with the new Intel Thread Director, Topaz 2 provides powerful performance no matter the application or workload, thanks to its hybrid core architecture.

Starting at $599, three Topaz 2 models (NUC12TZi7, NUC12TZi5, and NUC12TZi3) are available to preorder from Simply NUC across our global sites. The NUC12TZi7 model based on the Intel Core i7-1260P processor is intended for usage where higher performance is needed. To accommodate a variety of price points, more cost-effective performance options are also available with the NUC12TZi5 model based on the Intel Core i5-1240P processor and the NUC12TZi3 model based on the Intel Core i3-1215U processor. Units are expected to begin shipping in late June.

During the International Supercomputing Conference on May 31, 2022, in Hamburg, Germany, Jeff McVeigh, vice president and general manager of the Super Compute Group at Intel Corporation, announced Rialto Bridge, Intel's data center graphics processing unit (GPU). Using the same architecture as the Intel data center GPU Ponte Vecchio and combining enhanced tiles with Intel's next process node, Rialto Bridge will offer up to 160 Xe cores, more FLOPs, more I/O bandwidth and higher TDP limits for significantly increased density, performance and efficiency.

"As we embark on the exascale era and sprint towards zettascale, the technology industry's contribution to global carbon emissions is also growing. It has been estimated that by 2030, between 3% and 7% of global energy production will be consumed by data centers, with computing infrastructure being a top driver of new electricity use," said Jeff McVeigh, vice president and general manager of the Super Compute Group at Intel Corporation.

The ambitious performance enhancement by Intel Graphics rivaling NVIDIA DLSS and AMD FSR, the Intel XeSS (Xe Super Sampling,) will debut on May 20, 2022, with a patch for "Dolmen," developer Massive Work Studio announced. This matches our report from March 2022 that referenced an "early Summer" debut. This would mean Intel Graphics has a driver release planned very soon, for its Xe LP-based iGPUs and Iris Xe MAX discrete GPU; as well as the first round of Arc 3 "Alchemist" mobile graphics, which will launch with XeSS support.

Much like FSR and DLSS, XeSS works with a supported game to render raster 3D scenes at a lower resolution than the display resolution, and upscales them using a sophisticated algorithm that minimizes image quality loss, with a net gain in frame-rates. XeSS will play a particularly big role in Intel's plans to grab a slice of the gaming graphics market with its Arc "Alchemist" discrete GPUs. XeSS appears to work similar to AMD FSR 2.0, with its upscaler using motion-vectors and temporal data from the game engine to reconstruct details in the outbound frames. Also, much like FSR, XeSS will be open to GPUs from other brands.Update May 17th: The Dolmen Twitter handle just put out an update that XeSS support is coming "this Summer," implying that it will not release on May 20 as earlier reported.

XeSS is arguably the most boasted-about new graphics technology by Intel. A performance enhancement that is functionally similar to AMD FSR or NVIDIA DLSS, XeSS will instrumental in making Arc "Alchemist" GPUs offer high performance with minimal loss to image quality, especially given that Intel's first crack at premium gaming GPUs also happens to include real-time ray tracing support, to meet DirectX 12 Ultimate specs.

Intel announced that XeSS won't be debuting with the Arc 3 series mobile GPUs that launched yesterday (March 30), but instead alongside the Arc 5 and Arc 7 series slated for early-Summer (late-May to early-June). At launch, several AAA titles will be optimized for XeSS, including "Ghostwire: Tokyo," "Death Stranding," "Anvil," "Hitman III," "GRID Legends," etc.

For decades, Intel has been a champion for PC platform innovation. We have delivered generations of CPUs that provide the computing horsepower for billions of people. We advanced connectivity through features like USB, Thunderbolt and Wi-Fi. And in partnership with the PC ecosystem, we developed the ground-breaking PCI architecture and the Intel Evo platform, pushing the boundary for what mobile products can do. Intel is uniquely positioned to deliver PC platform innovations that meet the ever-increasing computing demands of professionals, consumers, gamers and creators around the world. Now, we take the next big step.

Today, we are officially launching our Intel Arc graphics family for laptops, completing the Intel platform. These are the first discrete GPUs from our Intel Arc A-Series graphics portfolio for laptops, with our desktop and workstation products coming later this year. You can visit our Newsroom for our launch video, product details and technical demos, but I will summarize the highlights of how our Intel Arc platform and A-Series mobile GPU family will deliver hardware, software, services and - ultimately - high-performance graphics experiences.

ASRock Industrial launches a new range of industrial motherboards powered by 12th Gen Intel Core Processors (Alder Lake-S) with up to 16 cores and 24 threads, supporting the new Intel 600 Series W680, Q670, and H610 chipsets. Featuring high computing power with performance hybrid architecture and enhanced AI capabilities, rich IOs and expansions for up to quad displays 4K@60 Hz, USB 3.2 Gen2x2 (20 Gbit/s), triple Intel 2.5 GbE LANs with real-time TSN, multi M.2 Key M, ECC memory, plus TPM 2.0, and wide voltage support. The new series covers comprehensive form factors, including industrial Mini-ITX, Micro-ATX, and ATX motherboards for diverse applications, such as factory automation, kiosks, digital signage, smart cities, medical, and Edge AIoT applications.

At Intel's 2022 investor meeting, the company has presented a technology roadmap update to give its clients an insight into what is to come. Today, team blue announced one of the first discrete data-centric graphics cards in the lineup, codenamed Arctic Sound-M GPU. Based on the DG2 Xe-HPG variation of Intel Xe GPUs, Arctic Sound-M is the company's first design to enter the data center space. The DG2 GPU features 512 Execution Units (EUs), which get passive cooling from the single-slot design of Arctic Sound's heatsink, envisioned for data center enclosures with external airflow.

One of the most significant selling points that Intel advertises is support for hardware-based AV1 encoding standard. This feature allows the card to achieve a 30% greater bandwidth, and it is the main differentiator between consumer-oriented Arc Alchemist GPUs and itself. The card is powered by PCIe power and an 8-pin EPS power connector. Arctic Sound-M is already sampling to select customers and it will become available in the middle of 2022.Below is Intel's teaser video.

At Intel's 2022 Investor Meeting, Chief Executive Officer Pat Gelsinger and Intel's business leaders outlined key elements of the company's strategy and path for long-term growth. Intel's long-term plans will capitalize on transformative growth during an era of unprecedented demand for semiconductors. Among the presentations, Intel announced product roadmaps across its major business units and key execution milestones, including: Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics, Intel Foundry Services, Software and Advanced Technology, Network and Edge, Technology Development, More: For more from Intel's Investor Meeting 2022, including the presentations and news, please visit the Intel Newsroom and Intel.com's Investor Meeting site.

Intel today released oneAPI 2022 toolkits. Newly enhanced toolkits expand cross-architecture features to provide developers greater utility and architectural choice to accelerate computing. "I am impressed by the breadth of more than 900 technical improvements that the oneAPI software engineering team has done to accelerate development time and performance for critical application workloads across Intel's client and server CPUs and GPUs. The rich set of oneAPI technologies conforms to key industry standards, with deep technical innovations that enable applications developers to obtain the best possible run-time performance from the cloud to the edge. Multi-language support and cross-architecture performance acceleration are ready today in our oneAPI 2022 release to further enable programmer productivity on Intel platforms," said Greg Lavender, Intel chief technology officer, senior vice president and general manager of the Software and Advanced Technology Group.

New capabilities include the world's first unified compiler implementing C++, SYCL and Fortran, data parallel Python for CPUs and GPUs, advanced accelerator performance modeling and tuning, and performance acceleration for AI and ray tracing visualization workloads. The oneAPI cross-architecture programming model provides developers with tools that aim to improve the productivity and velocity of code development when building cross-architecture applications.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has selected Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) to build its third-generation, high performance computing (HPC) system, called Kestrel. Named for a falcon with keen eyesight and intelligence, Kestrel's moniker is apropos for its mission—to rapidly advance the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) energy research and development (R&D) efforts to deliver transformative energy solutions to the entire United States.

Installation of the new system will begin in the fall of 2022 in NREL's Energy Systems Integration Facility (ESIF) data center. Kestrel will complement the laboratory's current supercomputer, Eagle, during the transition. When completed—in early 2023—Kestrel will accelerate energy efficiency and renewable energy research at a pace and scale more than five times greater than Eagle, with approximately 44 petaflops of computing power.

Intel's Aurora supercomputer is a $500 million contract with the US Department of Energy to deliver an exascale supercomputer for Argonne National Laboratory. The project aims to build a machine capable of cranking over one ExaFLOP of computing at sustained workloads. The supercomputer aims to reach two ExaFLOPs of computing power once the installation system is completed and powered. The contract bound Intel to create accelerators that are powerful enough to achieve this magical number. However, they left Intel with room to do a little bit extra. With Ponte Vecchio GPU behind the project, it seems like the GPU is performing better than expected.

According to Intel's CEO, Pat Gelsinger, the system will reach over 2 ExaFLOPs at peak and a bit below in sustained workloads. As per preliminary calculations done by The Next Platform, the system's estimations point towards 2.43 ExaFLOPs peak and around 1.7 ExaFLOPs in sustained workloads at Double-precision floating-point format math, aka FP64. The system will utilize Intel Xeon Sapphire Rapids processors with HBM memory and the powerful Ponte Vecchio GPU with 47 tiles and over 100 billion transistors.