The chip is part of Intel’s cunning plan to take on Nvidia in the AI silicon market. Chipzilla claims it is the most complex system-on-chip or SOC to date with 100 billion transistors, nearly twice as many as Nvidia's flagship A100 data centre graphics processing unit.

Ponte Vecchio’s 100 billion transistors are divided among no fewer than 47 individual processing modules made using five different manufacturing processes.

Normally, an SOC's processing modules are arranged side by side in a flat two-dimensional design. Ponte Vecchio, however, stacks the modules on one another in a vertical, three-dimensional structure created using Intel's Foveros technology.

The bulk of Ponte Vecchio's processing power comes from a set of modules aptly called the Compute Tiles. Each Compute Tile has eight Xe cores, GPU cores specifically optimized to run AI workloads. Every Xe core, in turn, consists of eight vector engines and eight matrix engines, processing modules specifically built to run the narrow set of mathematical operations that AI models use to turn data into insights.

Intel claims the chip can manage 45 teraflops, or about 45 trillion operations per second going downhill and with the wind behind it.

The article adds that it achieved those speeds while processing 32-bit single-precision floating-point values floating point values — and that at least one customer has already signed up to use Ponte Vecchio

The Argonne National Laboratory will include Ponte Vecchio chips in its upcoming $500 million Aurora supercomputer. Aurora will provide one exaflop of performance when it becomes fully operational, the equivalent of a quintillion calculations per second.