Inside Intel’s Delays in Delivering a Crucial New Microprocessor

At an online event on Tuesday to discuss Sapphire Rapids, which is named after a portion of the Colorado River, Intel customers described plans to use the processor, which they said would bring particular benefits for artificial intelligence tasks. The product, formally called the 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processor, was introduced along with another delayed addition to the Xeon chip family. That product, formerly code-named Ponte Vecchio, was designed to accelerate special-purpose jobs and be used alongside Sapphire Rapids in high-performance computers.

In an interview, Mr. Gelsinger said Sapphire Rapids had the makings of a hit, despite the delays. He picked Ms. Rivera in 2021 to take over the unit developing it, where she is using lessons from the experience to change how Intel designs and tests its products. He said Intel had conducted several internal reviews of what happened with Sapphire Rapids, and “we’re not done.”

Sapphire Rapids began in 2015, with discussions among a small group of Intel engineers. The product was the company’s first attempt at a new approach in chip design. Companies now routinely pack tens of billions of tiny transistors on each piece of silicon, but competitors like Advanced Micro Devices and others had started making processors from multiple chips bundled together in plastic packages.

Intel engineers came up with a design with four chips, each one sporting 15 processor “cores” that act like individual calculators for general-purpose computing jobs. The company also decided to include extra blocks of circuitry for special tasks — including artificial intelligence and encryption — and to communicate with other components, such as chips that store data.

The interaction among so many elements is “very complex,” said Shlomit Weiss, who jointly leads Intel’s design engineering group. “Complexity usually brings problems.”

The Sapphire Rapids team grappled with bugs, flaws caused by designer errors or manufacturing glitches that can cause a chip to make incorrect calculations, work slowly or stop functioning. They were also affected by delays in the product’s manufacturing process.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/10/technology/intel-sapphire-rapids-microprocessor.html