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Intel Announces Inference-Optimized Xe3P Graphics Card with 160GB VRAM
- RoyTyrell 1y agoWill 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 1y agoIntel 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 1y agoOpenVino 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.html#hardware-prerequisite https://docs.pytorch.org/docs/stable/notes/get_start_xpu.htm...
- pjmlp 1y agoThere is PyTorch support on oneAPI.
- knowitnone3 1y agoAny 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 1y ago> What's the advantage here? Stock number go up
- creaturemachine 1y agoThe AI bubble might not last another year. Better get a few more pumps in before it blows.
- Mars008 1y agoAI 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.
- thenaturalist 1y agoThe technology, maybe - and if on local. The public co valuations of quickly depreciating chip hoarders selling expensive fever dreams to enterprises are gonna pop though. Spend 3-7 USD for 20 cents in return and 95% project failures rates for quarters on end aren't gonna go unnoticed on Wall St.
- Mars008 1y agoSo far there is no 'plateau' in the nearest future. 'AI' as a science and its applications should develop further for the next several years. Models will get more efficient, but still the bigger the better. This is obvious. Even if models don't scale up well, they can be used collectively in parallel 'brainstorming'. This will still create demand for hardware. Stagnation is still possible in case of recession. In this case even stable businesses will suffer. As for efficiency, replacing one programmer in group of 10 with AI already will increase productivity and lower the price. In most cases. In reality adding AI accounts to existing group works better. This is _now_, not hopes or sci-fi. That's why I'm saying there is no way back. 'AI winter' is as likely as smartphones winter.
- thenaturalist 1y agoYour entire argument is whoefully ignoring the CapEx economics of all of this. But that's the foundation. And there is a plateau in real money spent on AI chips. You're ignoring a whole group of economic and finance professionals as well as - if you're inclined to listen to their voices more - Sama calling it a bubble. If not for AI spending, the US already would be in a recession. So your argument might sound nice and practical from a purely scientific perspective or the narrow use case of AI coding support, but it's entirely detached from reality.
- Mars008 1y agoTo keep investors happy and stock from failing? Fairy tales work as well, see Tesla robots.
- fragmede 1y agoIf 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.
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- AnthonyMouse 1y agoIf 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 1y agoIn 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.
- baq 1y agoGiven 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.
- reactordev 1y agoThis is a shareholder “me too” product
- thenaturalist 1y agoWhat 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBbJy-jhsAA 1: https://old.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1o1k5rc/new_intel_drivers_are_fire/nj01o5d/ https://old.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1o1k5rc/new_int...
- reactordev 1y agoWatson… Yeah even RTX’s are limited in this space due to lack of tensor cores. It’s a race to integrate more cores and faster memory buses. My suspicion is this is more me too product announcement so they can play partner to their business opportunities and continue greasing their wheels.
- epolanski 1y agoI 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 1y agoIt 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.
- AnthonyMouse 1y agoThat 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 1y agoIt'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 1y agoAdding 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.
- schmorptron 1y agoXe3P 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_ 1y agoI 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.
- schmorptron 1y agoMaybe not that low, but given it's using LPDDR5 instead of GDDR7, at least the ram should be a lot cheaper.
- Neywiny 1y agoCertainly an interesting choice. Dramatically worse performance but dramatically larger only time will tell how it actually goes
- schmorptron 1y agoRumor has it (according to MLID, so no one knows whether it's accurate) that AMD is also looking to use regular LPDDR memory for some of it's lower end next gen GPUs to not have to contend with nvidia over limited and cartelled GDDR7 supply. Maybe they're going to increase parallel bandwidth to compensate it? Or have wholly different tricks up their sleeve.
- woleium 1y agoprobably just a lot more of it, to capture that consumer ai market
- magicalhippo 1y agoWith 160GB, surely they can add more channels to compensate?
- benob 1y agoIs there anything preventing them from using heterogeneous memory chips, like 1/4 GDDR7 and 3/4 LPDDR? It could enable new MEO-like architectures with finer-grained performance tuning for long contexts.
- api 1y agoA not-absurdly-priced card that can run big models (even quantized) would sell like crazy. Lots and lots of fast RAM is key.
- bigwheels 1y agoHow 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 1y agoI 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.
- halJordan 1y agoLpddr5x (not lpddr5) is 10.7 Gbps. Gddr7 is 32 Gbps. So it's going to be slower
- codedokode 1y agoYes but in matrix multiplication there are O(N²) numbers and O(N³) multiplications, so it might be possible that you are bounded by compute speed.
- electroglyph 1y agoboth are equally important. compute for prefill and mem bandwidth for generation
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- bigmattystyles 1y agoI remember Larabee and Xeon-Phi announcements and getting so excited at the time. So I'll wait but curb my enthusiasm.
- Analemma_ 1y agoYeah, 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 1y agoXe works much much better than Larabee or Xeon Phi ever did. Xe3 might even be good.
- throwaway173738 1y agoI’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 1y agoFunny 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.
- halJordan 1y agoDude, 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.
- adastra22 1y agoIt was many generations before vector operations were moved onto graphics chips.
- boomskats 1y agoIf you s/graphics/3d graphics does that still hold true?
- gary_0 1y agoYes. The earliest consumer PC 3D graphics cards just rasterized pre-transformed triangles and that's it; the CPU had to do pretty much all the math (but drawing the pixels was considered the hard part). Later, "Hardware Transform and Lighting (T&L)" was introduced circa 2000 by cards like the GeForce 256.
- Sesse__ 1y agoAnd even then, you couldn't really get any sort of serious matmul out of it; they were per-vertex, not per-pixel. Per-pixel matmul (which is what you really need for anything resembling GPGPU) came with Shader Model 2.0, circa 2002; Radeon 9700, the GeForce FX series and the likes. CUDA didn't exist (nor really any other form of compute shaders), but you could wrangle it with pixel shaders, and some of us did.
- eadwu 1y agoIt'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 1y agoOr 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-ai-llm-activity-7374886399185055744-Y59o/ https://www.linkedin.com/posts/storagereview_storagereview-a...
- Tepix 1y agoSound as if it won‘t be widely available before 2027 which disappointing for a 341GB/s chip.
- storus 1y agoIntel leadership actually reads HN? Mindblown...
- silisili 1y agoBetween 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 1y agoGelsinger 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.
- cwillu 1y agoAny discussion of an intel entry to discrete graphics cards needs to at least _mention_ intel's repeated history of abandoning discrete graphics cards.
- sharts 1y agoYou’re saying it’s like the Google of graphics cards?
- cwillu 1y agoVery much so.
- hnuser123456 1y agoAt 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 1y agothe 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 1y agoHonestly, 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
- jychang 1y agoIt’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 1y agoHow can you tell without knowing the bus width?
- maeln 1y agoSlow 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.
- jychang 1y agoSlow is worse than nothing. What's the point of this card that's going to be released around the same time as DDR6, and DDR6 will be faster? Might as well as use cheaper system RAM if you system RAM is slower than VRAM.
- kingstnap 1y agoBandwidth 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.
- jychang 1y ago1. 600GB/sec is still slow as hell. You might as well as use regular DDR5 RAM then if you're so slow, you can spec regular system DDR5 RAM faster than 600GB/sec. The half decade old consumer 3090 is 1.5x that speed. The current 5090 is 1,792 GB/s. The current nvidia datacenter cards are 8 TB/s. What's the point of having lots of VRAM if your system RAM is faster? For context: if you have a 160GB dense ML model in VRAM and you're just running 600GB/sec, you can do... roughly 4 tokens per second AT BEST. That massive amount of VRAM is unusable if it's slow. 2. 512 bit LPDDR5x is most likely just 512GB/sec with typical LPDDR5x that's not overly expensive. I would be HIGHLY surprised if they gave it the more expensive RAM that'd break 600GB/sec. The Intel B60 is at 456 GB/s and that's using GDDR6. Honestly, you're better off waiting for regular DDR6 to come out in a year and just build a system using that.
- lillecarl 1y agoI'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 1y agoWhat 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 1y 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 1y agoThat 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-p 1y agoLast year's M4 max MacBook is 520GB/s and (I expect) that should be closer to 1TB/s in a year or two by the time they are using ddr5. It would be deeply embarrassing if they had worse performance than apples cheaper laptop.
- matt-p 1y agoMaybe 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 1y agothe mad lad leopold did it, props
- DrNosferatu 1y agoAnyone has any idea about the price?
- incomingpain 1y agoA 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 1y agoAnybody knows memory bandwidth?
- DrNosferatu 1y agoIt would be great if they would greatly undercut the price of the NVIDIA DGX Spark.
- nullsmack 1y agowhoa, shoot this directly into my veins
- vrighter 11mo agodoes anyone still make gpus for graphics anymore?