Alleged details on Intel's Xe HP "Arctic Sound" leaked, may fail to live up to the hype

[mood]

Alleged details on Intel's Xe HP "Arctic Sound" leaked, may fail to live up to the hype

 

 

Back at Architecture Day 2020, Intel outlined its roadmap (image above) for its Xe (Gen 12) graphics architecture. Among the several variants of the Xe is Xe HP, which will be used to build next-gen Intel server and data center GPUs. Today a report has surfaced (via igor'sLAB) which claims it has the alleged details of those upcoming server GPUs that Intel is designing.

 

It was first leaked in February 2020 (via Digital Trends) that going forward, Arctic Sound, as well as other such high-performance GPUs from Intel, will feature a tile-based design. We learn today from the new igorLAB's report that each such tile will pack up to 512 graphics execution units (EUs).

 

For now, at least, we have the alleged details on two such Arctic Sound SKUs, the first being the Arctic Sound 1T (where the 'T' presumably indicates a tile) and Arctic Sound 2T. The 1T allegedly is a single-slot card and has 384 EUs out of the 512 EUs functioning properly, while the dual-slot 2T variant has 480 EUs in each tile working properly. So the 2T has 960 functioning EUs in total.

 

 

In December last year, Raja Koduri, the GPU chief at Intel, had announced that his company was already sampling Xe HP to its potential customers. As such, it's possible that the information igorLAB's received today has leaked out from such a source. In his tweet, Koduri had shown the image of a disassembled Xe HP graphics card alongside its forerunner, a Xe LP-based H3C XG310 quad-GPU.

 

Exciting to see these next to each other. Intel's first data center GPU that's in production, between Xe HP GPUs that are sampling to customers. We have ways to go, but an incredible journey so far. 🙏 the incredible team at Intel🙏 2020 is a memorable year for GPU technology pic.twitter.com/2fsJvVeDOK

— Raja Koduri (@Rajaontheedge) December 8, 2020

 

Below is a table detailing the rumored specifications of Arctic Sound alongside 2020's H3C XG310:

 

	H3C XG310	Arctic Sound 1T	Arctic Sound 2T
Execution Units (EUs)	4x 96 EUs	384 EUs	2x 480 EUs
Micro-architecture	Xe LP	Xe HP	Xe HP
Memory	4x 8GB LPDDR4-4266	16GB HBM2E (2.8G)	2x 16GB HBM2E (2.8G)
PCIe bus width	PCIe 3.0 x16	PCIe 4.0 x16	PCIe 4.0 x16
TDP	150W	150W	300W

 

Interestingly, the Digital Trends report had actually mentioned up to four tiles but we are only looking at a maximum of two tiles here. In its report, igor'sLAB speculates that Intel may have given up on bigger designs as the current 2T Arctic Sound allegedly already is a 300W product. And for adding another couple of tiles, the TDP is estimated to reach close to 500W.

 

So ultimately Arctic Sound may prove to be not much of an upgrade over the current Xe LP-based H3C XG310 offering unless Xe HP gains enormously per TFLOP and per watt over what Xe LP already offers.

 

 

Source: Alleged details on Intel's Xe HP "Arctic Sound" leaked, may fail to live up to the hype