At SC22, Intel had its new Ponte Vecchio GPU in different formats. While much has been made of the OAM format, PCIe is still easier to integrate into standard servers so we suspect a substantial volume (maybe half?) of Ponte Vecchio to be sold on PCIe cards. For that, there is the recently announced Intel Data Center GPU Max 1100 Series. At SC22, we were able to see one.
Intel Data Center GPU Max 1100 Series aka Ponte Vecchio PCIe at SC22
At SC22, we found the Intel DC GPU Max 1100 series PCIe card. This is a full-height dual-slot card.
On the top of the passively cooled unit, we get the Xe Link connector. Intel is building bridges that connect up to four Ponte Vecchio GPU Max 1000 series cards together with a faster interconnect than PCIe.
Here is the rear view of the card. We can see power input and a large heatsink to cool the 300W TDP GPU. This is interesting that Intel is sticking with 300W here. Those who follow me on Twitter may have seen we have access to a 310W NVIDIA H100 PCIe card. There are reasons for sticking with 300W, but it seems like traditional notions of limiting power and cooling in a PCIe slot are slowly easing. Still, OAM is the way forward with accelerators to reach higher power levels.
On the back of the unit, we get a partial cover across the PCB. We also have a number of stickers saying this is a pre-production part.
At this point, you may want to see the real PCB. This is an engineering sample, still with a few fix wires, showing the top side of the PCB.
That chip may be a cut-down version of the full OAM Ponte Vecchio (for power/ thermal reasons), but the package looks very similar in size. Here is the Ponte Vecchio OAM package (Max 1350/1550 series) that was shown without the liquid cooling lid that we saw in Intel Ponte Vecchio Liquid Cooled OAM Package at Innovation 2022
That is a lot of Data Center GPU Max 1100 series.
Final Words
Hopefully, we get to see more of these in 2023. Still, not many folks have seen the new Intel HPC GPU series, so we wanted to give our readers a quick look from the SC22 show floor. We are going to have more coverage of SC22 and the Data Center GPU Max series in the future. We already have some hands-on NVIDIA H100 and AMD MI200 coverage coming as well.
Update: We just published our SC22 video that has more views, and some video on this here:
Patrick, you were supposed to pull out your pocket knife and pry the lid off that chip, show us what’s underneath!