Intel announces that the Falcon Shores XPU has been discontinued. So for the time being there will be no super chip that combines GPU and CPU, although the competition sees the future in it.

On the sidelines of ISC 2023, Intel announces that plans for a Falcon Shores XPU have finally been put on hold. An XPU is a kind of “superchip” that combines CPU cores with a GPU component and memory. By connecting these three components with a high-bandwidth interconnect fabric, you get a chip that theoretically can optimally handle heavy AI workloads.

Nvidia and AMD

Nvidia sees a future in this. The Grace Hopper superchip will combine memory with a Hopper H100 GPU component and 144 cores based on the ARM architecture. The fusion of CPU and GPU was so relevant to Nvidia that the company attempted (unsuccessfully) to fully acquire Arm.

AMD also sees bread in the XPU. AMD has a powerful CPU architecture with Zen and an excellent foundation for data center GPUs with CDNA 3. The first combination of these will be the Instinct MI300, which combines 24 Zen 4 cores on a single chip with a CDNA 3 GPU and 128GB of HBM3 memory.

And what about Intel? The company had previously shifted its Falcon Shores architecture for data center GPUs. Intel has already confirmed that Falcon Shores will indeed arrive in 2025, but left uncertainty about the fate of the Falcon Shores XPU for a long time. It appeared to have been postponed and not abolished.

Climate or Material?

Not so: The world’s largest processor manufacturer does not like to combine its new GPUs with CPUs. Intel itself tries to justify this choice with a comparison to mountaineering, where you only climb to the top when the climate allows it. According to Intel, the climate is currently not suitable for an XPU.

However, Nvidia and AMD are climbing the same mountain, and they’re doing so with confidence. The problems for the metaphorical mountain climb do not seem to lie in the climate, but in the material that Intel wants to haul up the mountain. The shutdown of the accelerated computing group in late 2022 and the subsequent departure of Raja Koduri are clearly not contributing to Intel’s ambitions.