Intel details Crescent Island graphics for AI inference

Intel has detailed Crescent Island, a data center and workstation graphics card based on Xe3P GPU IP. Revealed at Hot Chips 2026, the card is designed as a 350 W, air-cooled PCIe product intended to fit any configuration.

The Intel-branded Crescent Island card includes 32 Xe3P cores, 256 XMX engines, 32 MB of unified L2 cache, and 160 GB of LPDDR5X memory. Intel is also allowing ODMs to build versions with up to 480 GB of LPDDR5X memory, giving the platform enough VRAM for large local open-source model deployments.

Xe3P changes the XMX pipeline from the four-deep systolic design used on regular Xe3 to 16-deep processing. The architecture adds FP4 support alongside FP8, with register files of 1 MB per core and L1 cache of 512 KB per core. Across the chip, there are 256 Vector engines and 256 redesigned XMX engines, grouped as eight per Xe3P core.

The silicon omits graphics processing elements for image output and is built purely for AI inference workloads, including long-context and agentic tasks.