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What Intel Learned When an Elevator Smashed Into Its Supercomputer Chips:

Intel has plenty of challenges in manufacturing processors. But it discovered a new one -- dangerous elevator doors -- during the development of Ponte Vecchio, the processor brains being used to construct the Aurora supercomputer.

Intel personnel were moving a bunch of the processors on a cart when a closing elevator door toppled it, Raja Koduri, leader of Intel's Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group, said at Intel's Innovation conference Tuesday.

He didn't say how many were ruined, but the loss stung because they were initial samples used to test performance and look for problems. "Every one of them at that stage is expensive," Koduri said in an interview. With hundreds of manufacturing steps, it takes months to make a single advanced chip.

The elevator door wasn't just a one-off bummer. It actually revealed a problem that stood in the way of Intel's effort to reclaim its processor manufacturing leadership: human error.

Ponte Vecchio is a mammoth processor with more than 100 billion transistors, just about as many as anybody's processor in the business. To make something that big, Intel used its advanced packaging methods to bring together 47 separate slices of silicon.

But that packaging relied on humans, carts and elevators that are much more fallible than the processes Intel typically uses to build chips.

[...] In designing Ponte Vecchio, Intel expected troubles with packaging. But the company was surprised with how smoothly it worked.

"The thing that we were most worried about was advanced packaging," but the 47 chiplets went together smoothly, Koduri said in a press conference. The problems came from mundane problems like a bug in the PCI Express communications system.

That result helped convince Intel it could employ advanced packaging for a critical processor like Meteor Lake.

"It gave us a lot of confidence for higher volume products to do advanced packaging," Koduri said.

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