Intel has unveiled details of its "Crescent Island" graphics card at Hot Chips 2026. Based on the Xe3P GPU IP, this 350 W, air-cooled PCIe device targets data centers and workstations. The GPU features 32 Xe3P cores, 256 XMX engines, 32 MB of unified L2 cache, and standard LPDDR5X memory configurations.

While Intel-branded cards include 160 GB of LPDDR5X memory, Original Design Manufacturers (ODMs) can equip the hardware with up to 480 GB for maximum capacity. This high-memory configuration enables local inference of frontier open-source models. The Xe3P pipeline redesign shifts XMX engines from a four-deep systolic design to a 16-deep processing architecture, supporting FP4 and FP8 formats.

The silicon lacks graphics processing elements, focusing purely on AI inference tasks like long context and agentic workflows. Each core includes 1 MB of register files and 512 KB of L1 cache. For demanding applications, such as running the trillion-parameter Kimi K3 model, four GPUs with 480 GB each provide the necessary aggregate system memory. Intel offers day-zero support for major frameworks, facilitating immediate integration despite the high cost of DRAM.