Intel's long-discontinued Arctic Sound Xe-HP series of GPUs have reappeared recently. An engineering sample card with a dual-chip design and integrated four stacks of HBM2E video memory has been leaked. It is regarded as a "ghost" left over from the old roadmap that Intel abandoned in 2021. A user originally ordered an Intel Ponte Vecchio GPU, but unexpectedly received this Arctic Sound 2T sample when receiving the goods, giving this product that had been officially canceled a few years ago clearly exposed for the first time.
Back in 2018, the Intel graphics team planned multiple product lines based on the first-generation Xe GPU architecture, covering gaming, workstations, and data centers, including the multi-chip package and massive Ponte Vecchio, as well as the Arctic Sound series for the workstation and server markets. The then head of architecture, Raja Koduri, had publicly demonstrated Arctic Sound’s actual chips and revealed that the series would provide three different configurations of 1 chip (1-Tile), 2 chips (2-Tile) and 4 chips (4-Tile) to meet different computing power and power consumption needs. However, as the project progressed, technical and product-level pressures gradually emerged. Intel eventually announced the cancellation of Arctic Sound, and Ponte Vecchio itself suffered serious delays. It was not until many years later that it was finally officially deployed on the Aurora supercomputer.
In terms of data center and AI acceleration layout, Intel subsequently shifted its focus to the XPU route and launched a new generation of Falcon Shores solution that integrates CPU and GPU computing. However, this highly anticipated product line was also completely canceled this year. The company has now set its sights on the new Jaguar Shores platform scheduled to debut in 2027. This series of turning points is widely interpreted by the industry as the epitome of Intel's late start and missed opportunities in the data center AI era. In the field of high-performance acceleration chips, Nvidia and AMD have achieved far leading advantages in the market and ecosystem.
The Arctic Sound sample card exposed this time was released by X platform user ChipsByLayers. It can be seen that the entire package integrates two computing chipsets based on the Xe-HP architecture and is equipped with four HBM2E video memory packaging positions. The top of the package is printed with the "Intel Confidential" logo and sample code information such as "QVS8 1.00 GHz". According to the internal plan of the year, the 2-Tile version of Arctic Sound GPU was designed to have a total of 1024 EU, and each computing chip was 512 EU. The entire card could theoretically provide more than 20 TFLOPS single-precision floating point performance within a power consumption range of about 300W. The complete product matrix includes: the 1-Tile version is equipped with 512 EU, estimated to be about 4096 cores, and provides about 12.2 TFLOPS at 150W power consumption; the 2-Tile version is 1024 EU, estimated to be about 8192 cores; the 4-Tile flagship version is stacked to 2048 EU, about 16384 cores, and the target performance is about 36 TFLOPS, corresponding to Power consumption range of 400W to 500W.
Looking back today, this set of photos is more of a piece of product history that failed to materialize. Today, Intel's strategy in the graphics business has undergone significant changes. In the consumer and lightweight professional markets, integrated graphics cards and independent GPUs using GDDR or LPDDR memory are the mainstream routes. High-bandwidth HBM memory has temporarily faded out of its new generation of graphics products. The current Arc series and dedicated graphics cards for workstations and servers focus on cost-effectiveness in the fields of AI inference and professional graphics. The next-generation Xe3P architecture GPU, codenamed Crescent Island, is planned to be equipped with up to 480GB of LPDDR5X memory to benchmark mainstream AI and accelerated computing scenarios in terms of cost and deployment flexibility.
In the medium to long term, the industry's attention has gradually turned to new platforms such as Jaguar Shores and Crescent Island, which are regarded as key nodes for Intel to return to the high-performance GPU and AI acceleration track. However, compared with the huge software and hardware ecosystem that Nvidia and AMD have built, Intel obviously still faces a long and difficult catching-up process if it wants to achieve "catching up" in the data center AI market. Before the new product is actually launched, the leaked Arctic Sound 2T sample card is more like a reminder to the outside world: In the current era when multi-chip GPUs and high-bandwidth storage have become mainstream topics, Intel was once at the forefront, but finally chose to press the "reset" button.