Rounding out Intel’s insist GPU-related bulletins from this morning as phase of the corporate’s annual investor assembly, Intel has confirmed that the corporate is also getting willing to ship a extra fashioned GPU-primarily based mostly accelerator card for server exercise barely later this 365 days. Dubbed Arctic Sound-M, the forthcoming accelerator is being aimed in verbalize at the media encoding and analytics market, with Intel planning to purchase full attend of what ought to tranquil be the first server accelerator with hardware AV1 video encoding. Arctic Sound-M is anticipated to launch in the center of this.
The announcement of Arctic Sound-M follows a anxious, and in the waste sidetracked scheme of plans for Intel’s fashioned GPU server hardware. The corporate originally commissioned their Xe-HP collection of GPUs to anchor the fashioned server market, nonetheless Xe-HP used to be canceled in November of final 365 days. Intel didn’t stop on the server market, nonetheless exterior of the outlandish Ponte Vecchio create for the HPC market, they did support some distance flung from the exercise of barely so powerful dedicated server silicon.
Within the scheme of these fashioned merchandise, which had been codenamed Arctic Sound, Intel is as an different coming to market with Arctic Sound-M. Given the investor-centered nature of at the moment time’s presentation, Intel will not be any longer publishing powerful in the methodology of technical particulars for their forthcoming server accelerator, nonetheless we are able to infer from their teaser videos that that is an Alchemist (Xe-HPC phase), as we are able to clearly ogle the larger Alchemist die mounted on a single-slot card in Intel’s teaser video. Right here’s per the Xe-HP cancellation announcement, as at the time, Intel’s GPU frontman, Raja Koduri indicated that we’d ogle server merchandise per Xe-HPG as an different.
Arctic Sound-M, in turn, is being positioned as a server accelerator card for the media market, with Intel calling it a “media and analytics supercomputer”. Accordingly, Intel is placing especially heavy emphasis on the media processing capabilities of the cardboard, both with regards to total throughput and in codecs supported. In verbalize, Intel expects that Arctic Sound-M might presumably per chance be the first accelerator card released with hardware AV1 encoding give a maintain to, giving the corporate an edge with bandwidth-sensitive customers who’re willing to exercise the following-generation video codec.
Curiously, this also implies that hardware AV1 encoding is a local characteristic of (at the least) the astronomical Alchemist die. Even though given the seemingly rate of the first hardware AV1 encoder, it stays to be seen whether Intel will enable it on their particular person Arc cards, or lumber away it restricted to their server card.
Meanwhile when it involves compute efficiency for media analytics/AI inference, Intel is quoting a figure of 150 TOPS for INT8. There aren’t a ton of gargantuan comparisons here when it involves competing hardware, nonetheless the closest comparison when it involves card dimension and exercise conditions might presumably per chance be NVIDIA’s A2 accelerator, the place on paper, the Arctic Sound-M would ship almost 4x the inference efficiency. It goes with out announcing that the proof is in the pudding for a brand unusual product luxuriate in Intel’s GPUs, nonetheless in the occasion that they’ll ship on these efficiency figures, then Arctic Sound-M might presumably per chance be ready to soundly employ a really particular area of interest in the larger server accelerator marketplace.
Past that, luxuriate in the relaxation of Intel’s Arc(tic) merchandise, request to hear extra particulars barely later this 365 days.
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