Intel has a lot of challenges in manufacturing processors. But he made a new discovery — dangerous elevator doors — during Ponte Vecchio’s development, the processor’s brains were being used to build the Aurora supercomputer.
Intel personnel were moving a group of processors on a cart when a closed elevator door knocked it over, Raja Kodori, leader of Intel’s Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group, said at Intel’s Innovation Conference on Tuesday.
He did not say how many were wasted, but the loss occurred because they were early samples used to test performance and look for problems. “Each one of them is expensive at this stage,” Kodori said in an interview. With hundreds of manufacturing steps, it takes months to create a single advanced chip.
The elevator door wasn’t just a bar. It actually revealed a problem that was standing in the way of Intel’s attempt to regain its processor manufacturing leadership: human error.
Ponte Vecchio is a massive processor with over 100 billion transistors, more than anyone in the business. To make something this big, Intel put together 47 separate slices of silicon using its own advanced packaging methods.
But that packaging relies on humans, carts and elevators that are far more imprecise than the processes Intel typically uses to make chips.
Building a meteor leak: More automation, less lift
In contrast, Intel uses a lot of automation for advanced packaging under its 2023 PC processor, codenamed Meteor Lake. The Meteor Lake elements, called chiplets, will be incorporated into a single processor at Intel’s new advanced packaging fabrication facility, or fab, near Portland, Oregon, Kodori said.
The Ponte Vecchio processor is designed to accelerate tasks such as scientific calculations, graphics and artificial intelligence. It is now officially named Intel’s Data Center GPU. Only Aurora supercomputers get the processors right now, but Intel plans to sell them more widely starting in 2023, Kodori said. They primarily compete against Nvidia’s new Hopper H100 graphics processing units.
Supercomputers are important, but Meteor Leak is more important to Intel’s fortunes. PC processors are one of the company’s largest product lines, and rivals AMD and Apple have become more competitive.
Meteor Lake Intel makes some chips with its new Intel 4 manufacturing process, a key step in the company’s effort to regain leadership lost to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and Samsung.
But with an innovative packaging technology called Foveros, Intel also connects these chips to TSMC’s others. Innovative packaging methods allow Intel to speed up some processor elements while keeping costs down on others.
Ponte Vecchio uses Foveros and another Intel packaging technology called EMIB. Where Fooros stacks the wafers on top of each other like pancakes, EMIB connects their edges with high-speed links. EMIB is key to another Intel processor — its Sapphire Rapids chip coming to servers in 2023.
In designing the Ponte Vecchio, Intel anticipated difficulties with packaging. But the company was surprised by how smoothly it worked.
“The thing we were most concerned about was the advance packaging,” Kodori said at a press conference, “but the 47 chaplets went together easily.” The problems came from mundane issues like bugs in the PCI Express communication system.
This result helped convince Intel that it could employ sophisticated packaging for flagship processors like Meteor Lake.
“It gave us a lot of confidence to do advanced packaging for high-volume products,” Kodori said.
