Comparative Analysis of Leading E‑Level HPC Processors: A64FX, H100, MI250X, and PonteVecchio

Commercial high‑performance processor market for E‑level computing is dominated by NVIDIA, AMD and Intel. This article analyzes four leading processors—Fujitsu A64FX, NVIDIA H100, AMD MI250X and Intel PonteVecchio—focusing on their compute architecture, parallelism, domain‑specific accelerators, supported data types and performance.

1. Fujitsu A64FX

Released in 2018 for Japan’s POST‑K (later Fugaku) supercomputer, the A64FX integrates 158,976 chips for a peak of 0.537 EFlops, with 52 cores per CMG, 32 GB HBM2, 1024 GB/s bandwidth, 7 nm TSMC process, 200 W TDP and 3.379 TFlops peak.

2. NVIDIA H100

H100, based on the Hopper architecture, adds fourth‑generation Tensor Cores, DPX instructions, increased SM count, enhanced thread‑block clustering, TMA engine, custom Transformer engine, and upgraded HBM3, PCIe 5.0 and NVLink. It contains 132 SMs (8 GPCs), 16 GB × 5 HBM3 (80 GB total), 3 TB/s bandwidth, 60 TFlops peak, 700 W TDP.

3. AMD MI250X

MI250X uses CDNA2 architecture, 2 GCDs with Infinity Fabric, 220 compute units, 16 MB L2 cache, 128 GB HBM2E (3.2 TB/s), 582 billion transistors, 95.7 TFlops peak, 560 W TDP, built on TSMC N6 process.

4. Intel PonteVecchio

PonteVecchio, based on Intel’s X‑HPC architecture, integrates 8 slices with 128 X‑cores, 144 MB shared L2 cache, 8 HBM2E modules delivering over 5 TB/s bandwidth, 16 X‑Link interfaces, PCIe 5.0, and uses 5 nm, 7 nm and Intel 7 processes, containing more than 100 billion transistors and achieving over 45 TFlops peak.

All four processors are fabricated with 7 nm or more advanced processes, feature high transistor density, employ advanced 2.5D/3D packaging and high‑bandwidth memory, and have power consumption exceeding 500 W.