Intel has shared new details about its next big data center GPU, code-named Crescent Island, and it's bringing something new to the table: the Xe3P architecture. Announced at the OCP Global Summit, Crescent Island will be Intel's first GPU to use this design, which will later show up in Celestial and Nova Lake-S products. It's built to handle modern AI inference workloads, offering better performance and power efficiency compared to the current Battlemage-based Xe3 architecture used in Panther Lake. What really stands out about Crescent Island is its memory setup. Intel says the GPU will support up to 160GB of LPDDR5x memory -- a big shift from the usual GDDR6 or GDDR7 that most GPUs rely on. LPDDR5x isn't as fast in raw bandwidth terms, but it's far more efficient and compact, making it a great fit for servers where power use and thermal limits matter more than maximum frame rates. This approach isn't entirely new for Intel; its early Xe DG1 graphics card also used low-power LPDDR memory before the Arc series launched.
The GPU is being designed with flexibility in mind. It supports multiple data formats like FP8, INT8, and BF16, which are common in AI and machine learning tasks. This versatility makes it ideal for inference workloads or even Tokens-as-a-Service (TaaS) models that need to process large streams of generative AI data quickly and efficiently. Combined with the Xe3P architecture's improved compute density, Crescent Island aims to deliver stronger AI inference performance at lower power costs.
Intel has made it clear that Crescent Island is mainly aimed at inference, not full-scale AI training, which differentiates it from GPUs like NVIDIA's Blackwell series. Instead, it's meant to work alongside CPUs and NPUs in Intel's broader data center ecosystem, forming part of a balanced compute platform. The company expects to start shipping samples in the second half of 2026, suggesting a full launch sometime in 2027.
Crescent Island also represents an important step for Intel's GPU roadmap as the company unifies its architectures across desktop, mobile, and data center platforms. With Xe3P, Intel wants to streamline software development and optimize performance across multiple environments, from consumer PCs to high-performance inference clusters.
Source: intel