Right now, if you’re a tech company, the money glitch of the moment is to position yourself in the AI sector. Intel has understood this, and you only have to look at the tremendous growth of its Data Center & AI sector in their latest financial results to understand the dynamic: +22% year-on-year! It’s against this backdrop that a leak concerning a PCB designed to house an Xe3P GPU for AI has surfaced!
Xe3P: leak of a PCB designed to house a monstrous GPU!
No HBM, but LPPDR5X!
Broadly speaking, the PCB shown corresponds to a gas pedal codenamed Crescent Island. As you can see, it’s designed to host a GPU with a monstrous package, surrounded by a large number of memory chips, in this case LPDDR5X. What’s more, this PCB seems to correspond exactly to an announcement the company made last October. That announcement mentioned a GPU running the Xe3P graphics architecture, while the board would be backed by up to 160 GB of VRAM, LPDDR5X. This leak seems to be in line with what the rookies are saying.
If the rookies are turning to LPDDR5X, we imagine it’s to ensure a good supply of memory chips. HBM is currently under pressure, and costs have skyrocketed in recent times. What’s more, this allows the company to offer an “affordable” AI gas pedal.
In addition to the unusual GPU package, we find a total of 20 memory slots: 12 around the GPU and 8 on the rear of the PCB. Otherwise, we can guess at a total of 18 power supply phases. In actual use, there should be fewer, as our colleague speaks of 13 populated phases. Finally, power is supplied via a 12V-2×6 connector mounted on the rear of the PCB, while a USB-C connector should be present on the side for debugging and validation.
Unfortunately, there will be no consumer gaming version:
Unfortunately, rumor has it that this Xe3P architecture is not intended for the consumer sector. For the time being, therefore, we can’t expect any kind of Intel Arc gaming card… At best, we can expect Arc Pro versions.