Will Rialto Bridge be Intel’s next graphics server?
Intel is very clear that its adventure in the world of graphics cards is not limited to a single attempt and if with the ARC Alchemists they have a road map that goes from Alchemist to Druid and that will last several years, then the same goes for their HPC charts. And it is that the successor of Ponte Vecchio would already have a name: Rialto Bridge.
The market for high-performance graphics for supercomputers and servers is something that seems very distant to us. However, it has become the ideal testing ground for future innovations in the field of graphics cards for our computers. Thus, the accumulated knowledge of Intel when implementing Ponte Vecchio has served them for the development of Tile GPUs from Meteor Lake onwards.
But with the continuous advancement in the form of increasingly powerful graphics processors and a market where raw power is the most important thing, having the best hardware to get the best contract is not limited to the present, but must also be looked at to the future. Especially when it comes to cards with graphics chips designed for TSMC’s 3nm node, which are already on the drawing boards of NVIDIA, Intel and AMD.
Rialto Bridge, the successor of Ponte Vecchio?
When the exploded view of Ponte Vecchio was leaked a few months ago, there was something that confirmed the existence of a successor, the fact that Intel to build its first graphics card for high-performance computing will not use the chiplets under the TSMC 3nm node to build said HPC graph. For you to understand better, Ponte Vecchio has a total of 16 Tile GPUs or Chiplets, but built under the 5nm node, while the future Intel Core 14 has a chiplet under the 3nm node.
Well, through a video of MLID we have been able to know that the successor of Ponte Vecchio receives the code name of Rialto Bridge or Ponte Rialto. Which we will surely not see confirmed by Intel until long after the final deployment of its current high-performance graphics, but we have no doubt that it is under development and that it could be the basis for future ARC Alchemist for PC. Of course, apart from double-precision floating point and with the cuts and classic elements of graphic hardware for PCs compared to servers.
At the moment we don’t know anything about Rialto Bridge, but what we do know is that it will result in a significant increase in computing power compared to Ponte Vecchio and that Intel could adopt HBM3 memory for its design. Without going any further, there is talk of an increase in power by 2.5 times in the second generation graphics card for Intel HPC. In any case, we still do not know details such as the improvements in the XMX units, equivalent to the NVIDIA Tensor Core. And it is that those of Raja Koduri and Pat Gelsinger intend to confront those of Jensen Huang on all fronts.
