Intel has unveiled its D-series "Crescent Island" inference graphics cards, led by the D270 SKU. A bare die shot reveals a compact GPU featuring 32 Xe3P cores, 256 XMX engines, and 32 MB of unified L2 cache. The XMX engines have been redesigned to 16-deep processing, up from the four-deep systolic design of standard Xe3.
Designed exclusively for AI inference—not training—the card supports up to 480 GB of LPDDR5X and includes FP4 and FP8 format support. Each core features 1 MB register files and 512 KB L1 cache. Notably, the Xe3P lacks graphics output elements, focusing solely on AI workloads with long context and agentic tasks.
It includes a media engine with four encoders and four decoders for multimodal applications. The accelerator is a 350 W, air-cooled PCIe 5.0 x16 card, compatible with standard server infrastructure. Intel designed it for agents handling 100K context windows and thousands of reasoning steps.
Real-world performance remains to be seen.
Source: TechPowerUp News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing