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

[mft_]

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.

[Aurornis]

> 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)

[musicale]

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).

[schmorptron]

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

[baq]

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

[schmorptron]

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

[makapuf]

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.

[wmf]

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

[mikkupikku]

FPUs?

[musicale]

> what those are are really CUDA cards

That don't run CUDA?

[halJordan]

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.

[roenxi]

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.

[knowitnone3]

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?

[jsnell]

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.

[AnthonyMouse]

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.

[fragmede]

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.

[Perenti]

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.

[epolanski]

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.

[pointyfence]

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.

[reactordev]

This is a shareholder “me too” product

[toast0]

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.

[Mars008]

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

[teeray]

> What's the advantage here?

Stock number go up

[creaturemachine]

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

[cwillu]

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

[kobalsky]

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.

[hnuser123456]

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.

[sharts]

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

[bigmattystyles]

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

[Analemma_]

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.

[wmf]

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

[throwaway173738]

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.

[eadwu]

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]

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...

[tonetegeatinst]

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.

[Aurornis]

> 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.

[silisili]

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]

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.

[RoyTyrell]

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]

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]

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...

[pjmlp]

There is PyTorch support on oneAPI.

[api]

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]

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.

[btian]

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

How is this better?

[lillecarl]

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!?

[incomingpain]

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.

[DrNosferatu]

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

[mawadev]

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

[tommica]

Isn't this exactly that?

[jychang]

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.

[DrNosferatu]

Anyone has any idea about the price?

[g42gregory]

Anybody knows memory bandwidth?

[vrighter]

does anyone still make gpus for graphics anymore?

[nullsmack]

whoa, shoot this directly into my veins

[thedudeabides5]

the mad lad leopold did it, props

[Tepix]

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

[storus]

Intel leadership actually reads HN? Mindblown...