Intel introduces its Data Center GPU Flex Series targeting AI, gaming, and video applications.

Intel officially revealed its Data Center GPU Flex series on Wednesday — though the company started shipping some of its Arctic Sound-M discrete processing units for datacenters about a month ago. The new graphics boards are based on Intel's Arc Alchemist graphics processors and are aimed at a variety of datacenter applications, and will be available from various Intel partners when the products reach required levels of maturity.

Intel's Data Center GPU Flex family includes two base offerings: the single-chip Flex Series 170, which is based on one ACM-G10 GPU with up to 32 Xe cores (equal to up to 4,096 stream processors) and 16GB of memory, aimed at workloads requiring maximum performance; and the dual-chip Flex Series 140 card, which carries two ACM-G11 GPUs with 16 Xe cores and 12GB of memory, targeted at high-density machines. The Flex 170 features 512 execution units, 32 ray tracing units, 512 XMX engines, 4 media engines, a GPU base clock of 1950 MHz, a GPU max dynamic clock of 2050 MHz, a 256-bit memory bus with 576GB/s bandwidth, PCIe 4.0 x16 interface, and 150W TBP/TDP. The Flex 140 provides 256 execution units, 16 ray tracing units, 256 XMX engines, 4 media engines, a GPU base clock of 1600 MHz, a GPU max dynamic clock of 1950 MHz, 192-bit memory bus (2x 96-bit) with 336GB/s bandwidth, PCIe 4.0 x8 interface, and 75W TBP/TDP.

Both cards are powered by Intel's Xe-HPG architecture and support video transcoding using HEVC, AV1, AVC, and VP9 codecs, as well as virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) applications and AI inference through XMX instructions. For now, Intel positions these boards for Android cloud gaming and media transcoding workloads, with support for AI, VDI, and Windows cloud gaming to follow "when product is fully mature."

The Flex Series 170 can handle transcoding of up to eight simultaneous 4K video streams, 30+ 1080p streams, and rendering of 68 720p30 game streams. By contrast, the dual-chip Flex Series 140 meets the industry's one-second delay requirement while providing 8Kp60 real-time transcode in AV1 and HEVC/H.265 formats with HDR, and can handle 46 720p30 game streams (select titles only) on a single card and up to 216 game streams in a multi-GPU configuration.

Intel's Data Center GPU Flex family is fully supported by the company's application programming interfaces and tools, including oneAPI, OpenVINO, oneVPL, and VTune Profiler. Servers powered by the Flex family will be available from Dell, HPE, H3C, Inspur, Lenovo, and Supermicro.