AI accelerator with 480 GByte memory as PCIe card with 350 watts from Intel

As early as autumn 2025, Intel had announced the AI accelerator card with the codename ’Crescent Island’. At that time, however, there was still talk of 160 gigabytes of LPDDR5X-SDRAM. At Computex in Taipei, Intel is now promising versions of Crescent Island with up to 480 GByte of local memory.

The PCI Express card is also said to work with 350 watts of power consumption and air cooling. This could make it suitable for upgrading existing servers and workstations.

LPDDR5X instead of HBM

Crescent Island uses an AI accelerator chip from Intel's Xe series called Xe 3P. Intel also uses Xe technology for discrete and integrated graphics processors (Arc, Arc Pro). Intel has not yet revealed which manufacturing technology it uses for Xe 3P.

The memory controllers of the Xe-3P chip are designed for LPDDR5X-SDRAM. While this is slower, it is also cheaper and more power-efficient than graphics RAM like GDDR7 or even High Bandwidth Memory (HBM). Furthermore, LPDDR5X is likely to be more readily available.

From FP4 to FP64

Intel also highlights that Crescent Island processes many different data formats. In addition to typical AI formats such as 4-bit floating-point values (FP4 and MXFP4), this also includes FP64, making the accelerator suitable for some High-Performance Computing (HPC) applications.

Intel plans to bring Crescent Island to market by the end of 2026. A price has not yet been announced.

(ciw)