Jeff McVeigh, the VP and GM of Intel's super compute group, announced today
via a blog post that Intel is canceling its upcoming
Rialto Bridge series of data center Max GPUs and moving to a two-year cadence for data center GPU releases. Therefore the company's next data center GPU offerings will come in the form of the
Falcon Shores chiplet-based hybrid chips, but the blog notes these will be in production in 2025 — a year later than Intel's previous projections of 2024.
The HPC-focused Falcon Shores XPUs are designed for supercomputing applications and merge both CPU and GPU technology into one mix-and-match chip package, but they will now first arrive as a GPU-only architecture in 2025. These were supposed to arrive as a CPU+GPU architecture in 2024, meaning Intel's positioning against competing AMD and Nvidia products, both of which will launch this year, is severely impacted — Intel will now be multiple years late to a key architectural inflection point for the highest-end chips (more on that further below).
Additionally, Intel will cancel its upcoming Lancaster Sound GPU for its
Flex Series of data center GPUs. These GPUs are designed for lower-intensity work, like media encoding. Instead of pushing forward with Lancaster Sound, Intel will focus on the next-gen Melville Sound products for the Flex series.
Intel says the new release cadence is based upon customer expectations for data center GPU products, and it does generally match the incremental launch rate we see from other GPU companies, like Nvidia. The moves come in the wake of Intel's recent
restructuring of its AXG graphics group to address the gaming and data center markets separately by placing it under two other business units. The restructuring was designed to increase focus on the end markets served by the GPU products, and these new developments represent a further narrowing of focus. In addition, Intel says that it will now improve its focus on its software ecosystem and provide continuous updates for the Max and Flex series GPUs that include more performance, features, and expanded operating system support.
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