Intel is building the first exaFLOP supercomputer for the U.S. Department of Energy, powered by Intel Xe. Coming in at over $500 million, the Intel and Cray Inc. Aurora machine will utilise the very latest technology, including Intel’s unreleased and untested Intel Xe graphics architecture, to deliver unprecedented performance in both high-performance and artificial intelligence workloads.

The DOE will be running Aurora at the Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago, its quintillion floating point computations per second working towards improving “extreme weather forecasting, accelerating medical treatments, mapping the human brain, developing new materials, and further understanding the universe.” But can it run Crysis?

It probably can. That’s because Aurora will also see Intel roll out its Intel Xe graphics tech, the graphics architecture powering the company’s first discrete graphics card in 2020, on a mass scale. Intel has always planned on targeting everything from integrated right the way up to datacenter and AI graphics with Intel Xe, and the Aurora supercomputer, to be delivered in 2021, will be another ambitious target for Intel’s dev team.