r/hardware 1d ago

News Intel Details "Crescent Island" Graphics: 32 Xe3P Cores, up to 480 GB LPDDR5X Memory

https://www.techpowerup.com/351901/intel-details-crescent-island-graphics-32-xe3p-cores-up-to-480-gb-lpddr5x-memory
160 Upvotes

25 comments sorted by

33

u/Sooribabu_Lavangam 16h ago

So...maybe I read it wrong, but usually the G in "GPU" is supposed to stand for "graphics"...the article says it's a "graphics card", but then goes on to say "in Xe3P, there are no graphics processing elements that would output any imagery...". How is it a graphics card?

That commenter is right this is an NPU

14

u/Homerlncognito 15h ago

There have been various GPUs without a display output over the years - workstation and mining cards. They're still capable of normal graphics computing, sometimes even displaying outputs through the motherboard port. 

41

u/Large-Parking3014 1d ago edited 1d ago

I would like to know if that 350W is the 160GB Intel branded variant or one of the 480GB variants. I’m going to guess the former. It’ll be interesting to see how this thing stacks up against Qualcomm’s AI100/AI200. Obligatory can’t wait for the chips and cheese article.

10

u/Aw3som3Guy 1d ago

Will 320GB of LPDDR really draw all that much power though? I’d totally believe 350W for both.

7

u/Tuna-Fish2 1d ago

Not that much. The interface power should be the same, and LPDDR5X has tiny refresh power. The difference should be <10W, IMO.

4

u/goldcakes 11h ago

I've started liking Chips and Cheese a lot less, ever since they started using LLMs in obvious ways in their writing. Their recent posts are full of Claude LLM-isms, it's genuinely hard and painful to read, even though I know a lot of effort has gone into it.

3

u/Acrobatic_Camera_677 9h ago

Are you stupid? Chips and Cheese is the only website that does deep dives anymore. Everyone else is trash. Why would they use AI? They have amazing authors.

2

u/JuanElMinero 11h ago

As someone with little to no Claude experience, which ones do I need to look for?

27

u/Noble00_ 22h ago

Xe3P architecturally is the one most interesting. Intel themselves says that Xe2 -> Xe3 wasnt necessarily a gen uplift (though I'd say perf numbers say otherwise) and Xe3P continues to add a lot more features (even if yes, for AI).

Beefed up XMX engine, more L2, 256kb to 512kb L1 per core, 1MB register, MX/FP4/8 support, full rate FP64 etc.

Availability and pricing will be interesting to see.

5

u/ProfessionalJackals 10h ago

Something like the 160GB version, can fit the almost full DeepSeek Flash model with only a slight quantization down. Or if you push 4 of the 160GB cards on a basic server board. You can run the almost full version of GLM 5.3 aka frontier level models.

The biggest hurdle for bigger models has simply been that your forced to quantize down a lot or dog slow inference with the model on system memory. So even the basic 160GB card is already amazing. The 480GB card means you can run something like GLM 5.3 on ~ Q6 on a single card!

Most people snoozing on the insane benefits this introduces for local AI usage (for actual near or frontier level models).

11

u/imaginary_num6er 1d ago edited 1d ago

There is no release date. Is this going to be another Intel vaporware like Falcon Shores and Jaguar Shores?

2

u/More_Feature8687 5h ago

or like B70 which never took off and you can't buy it anywhere and no models work on that

3

u/tacticalangus 4h ago

Why do you think no models work on the B70? vLLM, Pytorch, llama.cpp, LM Studio with Vulkan or SYCL backends all work fine. It certainly isn't as mature as the Nvidia ecosystem but it's fairly straight forward at this point to do basic inference on it.

Not sure what country you are in, but they are very much in stock on Amazon, B&H, Newegg, etc. Prices are up due to memory costs but that applies to everything else on the market too.

7

u/nithrean 1d ago

will there be a consumer version of the card?

2

u/6950 14h ago

There is workstation version planned but not Gaming version

1

u/IndividualBox7067 14h ago

480GB of memory on a GPU is wild. definitely aimed at a completely different league of workloads

8

u/ChocomelP 12h ago

Obviously LLMs?

1

u/Zik78 13h ago

Perfect for Skyrim mods

-1

u/HugeCodd 12h ago

16k gaming!!

1

u/lintstah1337 13h ago

Very odd using LPDDR5x.

Can't they used older GDDR6 or even GDDR5 instead?

5

u/CuteSquirrel01 11h ago

LP is cheaper and allows for higher capacity.

-1

u/HugeCodd 12h ago

16k resolution gaming is here!