Intel Max brings breakthrough memory bandwidth to HPC and AI

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. The Max Series CPU provides up to 4.8x better performance compared to competition on real-world HPC workloads.1

• 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.2
• Provides flexibility to run in different HBM and DDR memory configurations.
• Workload benchmarks:
• 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.
• Workload benchmarks:
• 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.

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