Intel Announces Inference-Optimized Xe3P Graphics Card with 160GB VRAM

https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-crescent-island

by wrigby • 9 months ago

209 129 9 months ago

RoyTyrell• 9 months ago

Will this have any support for open source libraries like PyTorch or will it be all Intel proprietary software that you need a license for?

CoastalCoder• 9 months ago

Intel puts a huge priority on DL framework support before releasing related hardware, going back to at least 2017.

I assume that hasn't changed.

0xfedcafe• 9 months ago

OpenVino is entirely open-source and can run PyTorch and ONNX models, so this is definitely not a topic of concern. PyTorch also has native Intel GPU support https://docs.pytorch.org/docs/stable/notes/get_start_xpu.htm...

pjmlp3• 9 months ago

There is PyTorch support on oneAPI.

knowitnone3• 9 months ago

Any business people here that can explain why companies announce products a year before their release? I can understand getting consumers excited but it also tells competitors what you are doing giving them time to make changes of their own. What's the advantage here?

teeray• 9 months ago

What's the advantage here?

Stock number go up

creaturemachine• 9 months ago

The AI bubble might not last another year. Better get a few more pumps in before it blows.

Mars0084• 9 months ago

AI is not going anywhere. Now everyone wants to get a piece. Local inference is expected to grow. Documents, image, video, etc processing. Another obvious is driverless farm vehicles and other automated equipment. "Assisted" books, images, news,.. already and grows fast. Translation also a fact.

baq7• 9 months ago

There is a serious possibility this isn’t a bubble. Too many people watched the big short and now call every bull a bubble; maybe the bubble was the dollar and it’s popping now instead.

Mars0084• 9 months ago

To keep investors happy and stock from failing? Fairy tales work as well, see Tesla robots.

fragmede• 9 months ago

If you're Intel sized, it's gonna leak. If you announce it first, you get to control the message.

The other thing is enterprise sales is ridiculously slow. If Intel wants corporate customers to buy these things, they've got to announce them ~a year ahead, in order for those customers to buy them next year when they upgrade hardware.

AnthonyMouse2• 9 months ago

If customers know your product exists before they can buy it then they may wait for it. If they buy the competitor's product today because they don't know your product will exist until the day they can buy it then you lose the sale.

Samples of new products also have to go out to third party developers and reviewers ahead of time so that third party support is ready for launch day and that stuff is going to leak to competitors anyway so there's little point in not making it public.

jsnell• 9 months ago

In this case there is no risk of anyone stealing Intel's ideas or even reacting to them.

First, they're not even an also-ran in the AI compute space. Nobody is looking to them for roadmap ideas. Intel does not have any credibility, and no customer is going to be going to Nvidia and demanding that they match Intel.

Second, what exactly would the competitors react to? The only concrete technical detail is that the cards will hopefully launch in 2027 and have 160GB of memory.

The cost of doing this is really low, and the value of potentially getting into the pipeline of people looking to buy data center GPUs in 2027 soon enough to matter is high.

baq7• 9 months ago

Given how long it takes to develop a new GPU I’m pretty sure this one was signed off by Pat and given it survived Lip-Bu’s axe that says something, at least for Intel.

reactordev2• 9 months ago

This is a shareholder “me too” product

thenaturalist4• 9 months ago

What are they gonna do with their own FAB?

Not release anything?

There'll be a good market share for comparatively "lower power/ good enough" local AI. Check out Alez Ziskind's analysis of the B50 Pro [0]. Intel has an entire line-up of cheap GPUs that perform admirably for local use cases.

This guy is building a rack on B580s and the driver update alone has pushed his rig from 30 t/s to 90 t/s. [1]

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBbJy-jhsAA

1: https://old.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1o1k5rc/new_int...

epolanski• 9 months ago

I don't think you're giving much advantage to anybody really on such a small timeframe.

Semiconductors are like container ships, they are extremely slow and hard to steer, you plan today the products you'll release in 2030.

Perenti• 9 months ago

It can also prevent competitors from entering a particular space. I was told as an undergraduate that UNIX was irrelevant because the upcoming Windows NT would be POSIX compliant. It took a _very_ long time before that happened (and for a very flexible version of "compliant"), but the pointy-headed bosses thought that buying Microsoft was the future. And at first glance the upcoming NT _looked_ as if the TCO would be much lower than AIX, HPuX or Solaris.

Then of course Linux took over everywhere except the desktop.

AnthonyMouse2• 9 months ago

That wasn't even necessarily false. Windows NT on commodity hardware from the likes of Dell arguably did have a lower TCO than proprietary UNIX on proprietary hardware.

But then Linux on that same commodity hardware was lower yet.

pointyfence• 9 months ago

It's more than a year. They're sampling this to customers in the second half of 2026. It's a 2027 launch at best.

Intel has practically nothing to show for an AI capex boom for the ages. I suspect that Intel is talking about it early for a shred of AI relevance.

toast0• 9 months ago

Adding on to everyone else. It might help with sales for those with long procurement cycles.

If you're planning a supercomputer to be built in 2027, you want to look at what's on the roadmap.

schmorptron3• 9 months ago

Xe3P as far as I remember is built in their own fabs as opposed to xe3 at TSMC. This could give them a huge advantage by being possibly the only competitor not competing for the same TSMC wafers

mft_2• 9 months ago

I have no idea of the likely price, but (IMO) this is the sort of disruption that Intel needs to aim at if it's going to make some sort of dent in this market. If they could release this for around the price of a 5090, it would be very interesting.

schmorptron3• 9 months ago

Maybe not that low, but given it's using LPDDR5 instead of GDDR7, at least the ram should be a lot cheaper.

Neywiny• 9 months ago

Certainly an interesting choice. Dramatically worse performance but dramatically larger only time will tell how it actually goes

Tepix2• 9 months ago

It‘s LPDDR5X

baq7• 9 months ago

With this much ram don’t expect anything remotely affordable by civilians.

wmf3• 9 months ago

160 GB LPDDR5 is ~$1,200 retail so the card could be sold for $2,000. The price will depend on how desperate Intel is. Intel probably can't copy Nvidia's pricing.

dragonwriter• 9 months ago

I mean, even without that, the phrase “enterprise GPU”, does not tend to convey “priced for typical consumers”.

kjellsbells• 9 months ago

Uncle Sam owns a good chunk of Intel now. "Not affordable by civilians" might be precisely the target market: the DoD/national intelligence agencies have money to burn, can fund things long enough to stabilize Intel a little, and in exchange they get first dibs on everything.

Intel for intel on your Intels, perhaps.

musicale2• 9 months ago

Intel made a dent in the consumer gaming market with Battlemage.

They made a dent in the HPC market / Top500 with intel MAX.

It will be interesting to see if they can make a dent in the AI inference market (presumably datacenter/enterprise).

killingtime74• 9 months ago

Not sure where you're getting that from, battlemage has been considered a failure. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/report-indicates-intels-lates...

Aurornis3• 9 months ago

If they could release this for around the price of a 5090

This is not targeted at consumers. It’s competing with nVidia’s high RAM workstation cards. Think $10K price range, not $1-2K.

The 160GB of LPDDR5X chips alone is expensive enough that they couldn’t release this at the $2K price point unless they felt like giving it away (which they don’t)

minraws• 9 months ago

It's probably spark dgx competition. So around 3-5k would be ideally it.

Any higher and its not really a disruption

Sweepi2• 9 months ago

In the back of my head floats $200 - $300 for the 64 GiB GDDR7 that you get for spending 7k-10k on an ADA 6000 96 GiB instead of 2k for a 5090 32 GiB. Am I off? Is LPDDR5X more expensive?

nullsmack2• 9 months ago

They better watch the price because you can get a 128GB AMD Strix Halo mini pc for ~1700-2000 today, and those will be even cheaper a year from now. If they're trying to be competitive then it really needs to be more in that ballpark than the massively overpriced Nvidia range.

conradev• 9 months ago

The GDDR7 found next to most Blackwell chips is more expensive than the LPDDR5X next to this or an M-series/Strix Halo chip.

api• 9 months ago

A not-absurdly-priced card that can run big models (even quantized) would sell like crazy. Lots and lots of fast RAM is key.

bigwheels• 9 months ago

How does LPDDR5 (This Xe3P) compare with GDDR7 (Nvidia's flagships) when it comes to inference performance?

Local inference is an interesting proposition because today in real life, the NV H300 and AMD MI-300 clusters are operated by OpenAI and Anthropic in batching mode, which slows users down as they're forced to wait for enough similar sized queries to arrive. For local inference, no waiting is required - so you could get potentially higher throughput.

qingcharles• 9 months ago

I asked GPT to pull real stats on both. Looks like the 50-series RAM is about 3X that of the Xe3P, but it wanted to remind me that this new Intel card is designed for data centers and is much lower power, and that the comparable Nvidia server cards (e.g. H200) have even better RAM than GDDR7, so the difference would be even higher for cloud compute.

halJordan2• 9 months ago

Lpddr5x (not lpddr5) is 10.7 Gbps. Gddr7 is 32 Gbps. So it's going to be slower

freeqaz• 9 months ago

I think the better comparison, for consumers, is how fast is LPDDR5 compared to the normal DDR5 attached to your CPU?

Or, to be more specific, what is the speed when your GPU is out of RAM and it's reading from main memory over the PCI-E bus?

PCI-E 5.0: 64GB/s @ 16x or 32GB/s @ 8x 2x 48GB (96GB) of DDR5 in an AM5 rig: ~50GB/s

Versus the ~300GB/s+ possible with a card like this, it's a lot faster for large 'dense' models. Yes, even an NVIDIA 3090 is ~900GB/s of bandwidth, but it's only 24GB, so even a card like this Xe3P is likely to 'win' because of the higher memory available.

Even if it's 1/3rd of the speed of an old NVIDIA card, it's still 6x+ the speed of what you can get in a desktop today.

btian2• 9 months ago

Isn't that precisely what DGX Spark is designed for?

How is this better?

geerlingguy• 9 months ago

DGX Spark is $4000... this might (might) not be? (and with more memory)

bigmattystyles• 9 months ago

I remember Larabee and Xeon-Phi announcements and getting so excited at the time. So I'll wait but curb my enthusiasm.

Analemma_• 9 months ago

Yeah, Intel's problem is that this is (at least) the third time they've announced a new ML accelerator platform, and the first two got shitcanned. At this point I wouldn't even glance at an Intel product in this space until it had been on the market for at least five years and several iterations, to be somewhat sure it isn't going to be killed, and Intel's current leadership inspires no confidence that they'll wait that long for success.

wmf3• 9 months ago

Xe works much much better than Larabee or Xeon Phi ever did. Xe3 might even be good.

throwaway173738• 9 months ago

I’m personally just thinking about how they treated their embedded Keem Bay line. Totally shitcanned without warning. I doubt they consider this a core market to the degree that they will endure bad sales numbers for a while.

makapuf• 9 months ago

Funny they still call them graphics cards when they're really... I dont know, matmul cards ? Tensor cards ? TPU ? Well that sums it up maybe, what those are are really CUDA cards.

halJordan2• 9 months ago

Dude, this is asinine. Graphics cards have been doing matrix and vector operations since they were invented. No one had a problem with calling matrix multiplers graphics cards until it became cool to hate AI.

adastra222• 9 months ago

It was many generations before vector operations were moved onto graphics chips.

yjftsjthsd-h• 9 months ago

GPUs may well have done the same-ish operations for a long time, but they were doing those operations for graphics. GPGPU didn't take off until relatively recently.

wmf3• 9 months ago

This sounds like a gaming card with extra RAM so it's kind of appropriate to call it a graphics card.

musicale2• 9 months ago

what those are are really CUDA cards

That don't run CUDA?

mikkupikku• 9 months ago

FPUs?

roenxi• 9 months ago

Graphics cards haven't ever done graphics. Graphics is a screen thing. Nobody looks at their graphics card to see little pictures. So they are still misnamed, but they've always been misnamed. They do BLAS.

eadwu• 9 months ago

It'll be either "cheap" like the DGX Spark (with crap memory bandwidth) or overpriced with the bus width of a M4 Max with the rhetoric of Intel's 50% margin.

phonon• 9 months ago

Or it will be cheap, with the ability to expand 8X on a server. Particularly with PCIe 6.0 coming soon, might be a very attractive package.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/storagereview_storagereview-a...

Tepix2• 9 months ago

Sound as if it won‘t be widely available before 2027 which disappointing for a 341GB/s chip.

storus• 9 months ago

Intel leadership actually reads HN? Mindblown...

silisili• 9 months ago

Between 18A becoming viable and this, it seems Intel is finally climbing out of the hole it's been in for years.

Makes me wonder whether Gelsinger put all this in motion, or if the new CEO lit a fire under everyone. Kinda a shame if it's the former...

viraptor• 9 months ago

Gelsinger had a long term realistic plan. He was out around 11 months ago. You can't magic a new GPU in that timeframe - those projects have 3+ years pipelines for CPUs. I assume GPU will be a bit shorter, but not that much.

Whatever happened with new products today must've been started before he left.

cwillu2• 9 months ago

Any discussion of an intel entry to discrete graphics cards needs to at least _mention_ intel's repeated history of abandoning discrete graphics cards.

sharts• 9 months ago

You’re saying it’s like the Google of graphics cards?

cwillu2• 9 months ago

Very much so.

hnuser123456• 9 months ago

At least larrabee's cancellation resulted in the Offset engine going to the Firefall (2014) devs, which was a really great F2P MMO game for a while.

kobalsky• 9 months ago

the GPU market is not what it used to be, it's not some checkbox some executive needs to check to say "we are doing something".

the chips are so valuable now NVIDIA will end up owning a chunk of every major tech company, everyone is throwing cash and shares at them as fast as they can.

mawadev• 9 months ago

Honestly, Intel just has to build a GPU with insane amount of VRAM. It doesn't even have to be the fastest to compete... just a ton of vram for dirt cheap

jychang3• 9 months ago

It’s LPDDR5x

It’s gonna be slowwww

It’s gonna be what, 273GB/sec vram bandwidth at most? Might as well as buy an AND 395+ 128GB right now for the same inference performance and slightly less VRAM.

hengheng• 9 months ago

How can you tell without knowing the bus width?

maeln2• 9 months ago

Slow is better than nothing. A card with this much VRAM in a "prosumer" price range would be really interesting right now for workstation, to work with big models.

kingstnap• 9 months ago

Bandwidth depends very much on on bus width.

If its fast LPDDR5x (9600 MT/s) with 512 bit bus width (8 64bit channels (actually multiples of quad 16 bit subchannel nonsense)) it could be upwards of 600 GB/s. Lots of bandwidth like the beefy macs have.

numpad02• 9 months ago

Slow is better than unavailable

tommica2• 9 months ago

Isn't this exactly that?

maeln2• 9 months ago

We don't know the pricing yet.

lillecarl• 9 months ago

I'm hopeful for the second hand market, imagine when these have paid for themselves and you can do local inference of crazy capable models!?

tonetegeatinst• 9 months ago

What price is this sitting at? Because if its software support is decent then Intel might have just managed to break into the hardware for AI on the edge. Examples like self hosted LLM finetuning and RAG on a old dell or HP server with these type of cards on them.

Aurornis3• 9 months ago

Examples like self hosted LLM finetuning and RAG on an old dell or HP server with these type of cards on them.

This won’t be in the price range of an old Dell server or a fun impulse buy for a hobbyist. 160GB of raw LPDDR5X chips alone is not cheap.

This is a server/workstation grade card and the price is going where the market will allow. Consider that an nVidia card with almost half the RAM is going to cost $8K or more. That price point is probably the starting point for where this will be priced, too.

vardump• 9 months ago

That nVidia card is going to have 5x the memory bandwidth. LPDDR5X is going to be rather low bandwidth.

(My guess is Intel's card is only going to have about 400 GB/s bandwidth.)

matt-p3• 9 months ago

Maybe not old but if this was say a 6k card that would make it accessible to pretty much any business and at least some hobbyists. 160GB of Lpddr5 should be less than 2k, so it's easily doable if they've got the will. 4 x 5090s is 128GB and probs much more powerful at ~8k, so it would need to be 6/7k to make it make sense.

thedudeabides5• 9 months ago

the mad lad leopold did it, props

DrNosferatu2• 9 months ago

Anyone has any idea about the price?

incomingpain• 9 months ago

A year out, in that time nvidia and amd; not to mention huawei and others are going to hit the market as well. Intel are quite behind.

To me, the price point is what matters. It's going to be slow with ddr5. The 5090 today is much faster. But sure big ram.

RTX pro 6000 with 96gb of ram will be much faster.

So I'm thinking price point is below the 6000, above the 5090.

g42gregory• 9 months ago

Anybody knows memory bandwidth?

DrNosferatu2• 9 months ago

It would be great if they would greatly undercut the price of the NVIDIA DGX Spark.

nullsmack2• 9 months ago

whoa, shoot this directly into my veins

vrighter• 9 months ago

does anyone still make gpus for graphics anymore?

Intel Announces Inference-Optimized Xe3P Graphics Card with 160GB VRAM

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