Intel rebranded Arctic Sound-M discrete GPU as Flex Series for data center market deployment.

Intel has unveiled its new Data Center GPU Flex Series GPUs, previously codenamed "Arctic Sound-M," introducing the Flex Series 170 and Flex Series 140. This represents a significant rebranding strategy as Intel moves away from Arc GPU naming conventions, particularly for its workstation and data center products. The company says the new GPU is built to handle various workloads without compromising on performance or quality.

Intel positions the Flex GPU series as helping to lower and optimize the "total cost of ownership for diverse cloud workloads like media delivery, cloud gaming, AI, metaverse, and other emerging visual cloud use cases." The rebranding reflects a strategic pivot as the consumer Arc GPU division faces headwinds, with analysts suggesting Intel should consider packaging and selling the GPU business.

A key differentiator is that Intel claims to be the first in the industry with a hardware-based AV1 encoder in a data center GPU. The new Flex Series GPU features 5x the media transcoding throughput performance and 2x the decode throughput performance at just half the power of other GPUs in its class.

The Data Center GPU Flex Series 170 is a full-height, single-wide passively cooled card with a 150W TDP. It features a single GPU with 32 Xe Cores, up to 16 TFLOPs of FP32 compute performance, 16GB of GDDR6 memory, and a PCIe 4.0 interface.

The Data Center GPU Flex Series 140 is a half-height, single-wide passively cooled card with a 75W TDP. This model includes 2 x GPUs with 16 Xe Cores in total (8 x Xe Cores per GPU), delivering 8 TFLOPs of FP32 compute performance, and 12GB of GDDR6 memory in total, with 6GB GDDR6 memory per GPU.