Intel Announces Data Center GPU Flex Series
Intel released a new data center GPU Flex series, which was previously code-named Arctic Sound-M. Unlike Ponte Vecchio, the Flex series GPUs are aimed at cloud computing providers and are mainly used in fields such as visual processing, media, and artificial intelligence inference.
The Intel data center GPU Flex series offers two models, the Flex-140 and the Flex-170. The former is the version equipped with ACM-G10, which is a single-slot full-height card specification. It is equipped with 32 Xe cores, that is, 4096 stream processors, with 16GB of GDDR6 video memory, supports XMX instructions, can accelerate AI inference workloads, and has an 8Pin external power supply interface. The latter is equipped with two ACM-G11 chips, which are interconnected through PCIe bridge chips. There are a total of 16 Xe cores, that is, 2048 stream processors. It adopts a single-slot half-height card specification and can be placed in a more compact rack.
The Flex series is Intel’s first GPU with a hardware AV1 encoder, equipped with an industry-leading open source media solution that can simultaneously transcode 8 4K video streams or 30 1080P video streams. Its graphics processing power can be deployed as a cloud gaming GPU, although Intel is only targeting Android gaming. The software stack is handled by oneAPI, a cross-architecture programming tool designed to simplify programming across GPUs, CPUs, FPGAs, and AI accelerators. which can be used with Intel’s own equipment, or chips from other manufacturers, to optimize workloads.
It is understood that the operating systems supported by the Flex series GPUs include Windows 10 (client version only), Windows Server 2019, Windows Server 2022, and various Linux including RHEL, CentOS, Debian, and Ubuntu. Intel hasn’t disclosed pricing but has confirmed that it will start shipping in the third quarter of 2022.
