Intel Shifts Its HPC Max Series Focus To Falcon Shores In 2025

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Intel Shifts Its HPC Max Series Focus To Falcon Shores In 2025

Intel announced today it has cancelled Rialto Bridge and Lancaster Sound development while shifting its Max Series focus to their Falcon Shores XPU that is now set to ship in 2025...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Focus-Falcon-Shores-2025

[brucethemoose]

Has anyone ever heard of companies actually using Ponte Vecchio?

Benchmarks are excellent... but every git project I have read is trained on a Nvidia x100 cluster. And there were maybe 2 repositories than mentioned ROCm/CDNA on a single line in passing.

I cant recall ever seeing a cloud instance with it.

OpenVINO is also stupidly easy to use in PyTorch. Stable Diffusion (for instance) works with a single import and changing the device from "gpu" to "xpu." This is not my experience with other accelerators.

But alas if researchers cant peel themselves away from Nvidia, maybe Intel is smart to drop it and focus on something they can push as a CPU host, which might actually get researchers to use it.

[kylew77]

So what is an XPU, is it like an APU but with discrete level graphics? Give you console like graphics on a laptop? Or is this just something for the data center because a high end cpu / gpu combo from Intel sounds enticing!

[brucethemoose]

So what is an XPU, is it like an APU but with discrete level graphics? Give you console like graphics on a laptop? Or is this just something for the data center because a high end cpu / gpu combo from Intel sounds enticing!

Probably datacenter-only.

People (including me) have been asking for graphics heavy dies for years.... and whenever we get them from Intel or AMD, they are ignored by OEMs. :/

Anyway, that did get me thinking... would you really pay, say, 50% more money for an APU vs an equivalent GPU? Even if you do, most customers probably dont, which is a market dealbreaker for a console-like APU.

[jaxa]

Probably datacenter-only.

People (including me) have been asking for graphics heavy dies for years.... and whenever we get them from Intel or AMD, they are ignored by OEMs. :/

Anyway, that did get me thinking... would you really pay, say, 50% more money for an APU vs an equivalent GPU? Even if you do, most customers probably dont, which is a market dealbreaker for a console-like APU.

APUs/SoCs could be inevitable in the long run, because of the inefficiency of keeping the CPU, GPU, and memory apart. The datacenter "XPUs" are arriving first because the customers that need it, really need it.

The sub-$200 discrete GPU market is terrible and could stay that way from now on. Rembrandt/Phoenix are good for 1080p. They haven't been made into desktop APUs yet but AMD has already confirmed there will be APUs on AM5.

I suppose "console-like" implies 4K, and L3 (Infinity Cache) and/or L4 (HBM/VRAM/unified memory). Maybe that product won't come to consumers this decade, but the progression of standard APUs from Cezanne to Rembrandt to Phoenix to Strix Point will overtake the Xbox Series S at least. If you don't care about more than 1080p/60, you'll be covered, and FSR could be used to hit higher resolutions.

[brucethemoose]

If you don't care about more than 1080p/60, you'll be covered, and FSR could be used to hit higher resolutions.

This common justification for the existing APUs has bothered me as well, mostly because (even in today's crazy market) they cost way more than an old used dGPU+CPU.

[jaxa]

This common justification for the existing APUs has bothered me as well, mostly because (even in today's crazy market) they cost way more than an old used dGPU+CPU.

New things are going to cost more than used, no way around that.

Were Cezanne desktop APUs overpriced at launch? Yes. As a reminder, it was $359 for the 5700G and $259 for the 5600G, after a few months of being in OEM systems.

We'll have to see what they go for next time around. A Phoenix desktop APU with 8 cores and 780M graphics (RX 6400?) could easily command a higher price than a 7600X, maybe a 7700X.

[brucethemoose]

New things are going to cost more than used, no way around that.

Were Cezanne desktop APUs overpriced at launch? Yes. As a reminder, it was $359 for the 5700G and $259 for the 5600G, after a few months of being in OEM systems.

We'll have to see what they go for next time around. A Phoenix desktop APU with 8 cores and 780M graphics (RX 6400?) could easily command a higher price than a 7600X, maybe a 7700X.

But it will still probably be more expensive than a 6500XT + a 5700x... which you can buy right now.


Again, I hate coming off as so critical and really want a big desktop APU from Intel/AMD, but I am not paying $350+ for 12 CUs on dual channel DDR that is also going to starve the CPU.

[skeevy420]

jaxa A lot of what you say assumes that AM5 APUs aren't crappy versions of the CPU-only ones like the AM4 Zens. AM4 APUs have less cache, lower PCIe level, less performance than their non-APU counterparts. If that doesn't change then a lot of what brucethemoose says is correct, especially when considering the used market for graphics.

Even if the AM5 G series are equivalent to the X series people will still need to spend a lot of money on the fastest DDR5 available to take full advantage of the graphics. It comes down to how much you're willing to spend on premium ram. It's like $114 for 32GB of DDR5 4800 vs $339 for 32GB of DDR5 7600. You can get a lot of GPU for $200. Spend an extra $50 and you can get a 6700 XT (on sale) that'll run circles around an APU.

[jaxa]

jaxa A lot of what you say assumes that AM5 APUs aren't crappy versions of the CPU-only ones like the AM4 Zens. AM4 APUs have less cache, lower PCIe level, less performance than their non-APU counterparts. If that doesn't change then a lot of what brucethemoose says is correct, especially when considering the used market for graphics.

Even if the AM5 G series are equivalent to the X series people will still need to spend a lot of money on the fastest DDR5 available to take full advantage of the graphics. It comes down to how much you're willing to spend on premium ram. It's like $114 for 32GB of DDR5 4800 vs $339 for 32GB of DDR5 7600. You can get a lot of GPU for $200. Spend an extra $50 and you can get a 6700 XT (on sale) that'll run circles around an APU.

Phoenix has half the L3 cache of Raphael, but if the 8-core has 90-95% the CPU performance of a Ryzen 7 7700, and an iGPU that is perhaps a $100 equivalent, I could see someone paying $250-300 for that. PCIe 5.0 doesn't matter much, and A620 motherboards will not support it. Cezanne being limited to PCIe 3.0 was an actual problem in some cases, Phoenix gets PCIe 4.0. Maybe less lanes though?

It would have one feature not found in Raphael: the XDNA AI accelerator. Which could be seen as worthless if it's hard to use, but worth considering.

Memory bandwidth is a big problem, and hopefully AMD addresses that in a future APU with large L3, L4, or more memory channels. All of which seem unlikely right now.