Twenty-four years after exiting the dedicated graphics card market, Intel has returned. The landscape in those intervening years has changed so radically that what was once abandoned as an unnecessary side project now represents a major missing piece of Intel’s technology portfolio. Put simply, Intel needs a competitive GPU offering, and Arc Alchemist is where it starts.
This isn’t the first time Intel has tried to re-enter the GPU space. Larrabee was supposed to be a GPGPU (General Purpose computing on Graphics Processing Units), a chip that could do graphics but also other computational workloads, including scientific computing. Announced in 2008, a year later Intel said Larrabee would not be a consumer product but would instead go after the HPC (High-Performance Computing) market. Then Intel canceled Larrabee the following year, though some elements of the design lived on in the Xeon Phi offerings.
Now we’ve come full circle, as the third generation Xeon Phi, codenamed Knights Hill, was canceled in favor of a new high-performance architecture built from the ground up for the Aurora supercomputer. That’s the Xe-HPC
