Intel names Crescent Island the GPU D-series: up to 480GB LPDDR5X, 1.3 PFLOPS FP8 in a 350W air-cooled PCIe card that runs ~300B-parameter models on one card; sampling now

Why it matters

【Key points】

At the OCP Global Summit on Oct 12 (press release at 3:32 PM EDT), Intel gave its Crescent Island data-center inference GPU a product name, the Intel GPU D-series, and published its first performance figures. The Xe3P chip pairs up to 480 GB of LPDDR5X with 1.5 TB/s of memory bandwidth and 1.3 PFLOPS of FP8 compute, in a 350 W air-cooled PCIe card.

Intel says one card can run models of up to about 300B parameters, and an eight-GPU server can run models above 1T. It targets LLMs, long context, multi-tenant inference and robotics, and needs no liquid cooling or special racks. Customer sampling is underway; launch timing and pricing were not given.

Intel also showed Xeon 6+ ORv3 rack designs with more than 46,000 CPU cores at 133.45 kW per rack, aimed at orchestration and tool calls in agent workflows. StorageReview reports that 480 GB is the ceiling for partner-built cards, while Intel's own card carries 160 GB.

【Verifiable】

Intel press release: https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1783/intel-accelerates-open-infrastructure-for-the-agentic-ai-era

Intel newsroom: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/news/artificial-intelligence/intel-accelerates-open-infrastructure-agentic-ai-era.html

【Our read】

1. The D-series does not chase NVIDIA on peak compute. It trades HBM for large, cheap LPDDR5X: a fraction of the bandwidth, but enough capacity to hold big models and long-context KV caches on one air-cooled card.

2. Fitting a 300B model on one card is attractive for private open-model deployments, but only if Intel's software stack and inference frameworks such as vLLM keep up. Software sank Intel's earlier data-center GPUs.

3. The cards are still sampling. Real throughput, pricing and supply await independent tests.