Intel today introduced Intel Data Center GPU Flex Series for the Intelligent Visual Cloud.

The Intel® Data Center GPU Flex Series (formerly code-named Arctic Sound-M) helps free customers from the constraints of siloed and proprietary environments and reduces the need for data centers to use separate, discrete solutions. Intel offers customers a single graphics processing (GPU) solution built to flexibly handle a wide range of workloads without compromising on performance or quality. It also helps lower and optimizes the total cost of ownership for diverse cloud workloads like media delivery, cloud gaming, AI, metaverse and other emerging visual cloud use cases. The Flex Series GPUs address quality, density and latency requirements. With the industry’s first hardware-based AV1 encoder in a data center GPU, the Flex Series GPU provides five times¹ media transcode throughput performance and two times² decode throughput performance at half the power of competitive solutions. It delivers more than 30 percent bandwidth improvement³ for significant total cost of ownership (TCO) savings, in addition to broad support for popular media tools, APIs, frameworks and the latest codecs. Powered by Intel’s X^e-HPG architecture and backed by an expansive ecosystem of hardware vendors and software developers, these GPUs provide flexible scaling of AI inference workloads from media analytics to smart cities to medical imaging between CPUs and GPUs without locking developers into proprietary software.

About Performance: From the start, the Intel Data Center GPU Flex Series will offer capabilities for media processing and delivery and Android cloud gaming.

Media processing and delivery: The video processing demands of video conferencing, streaming, and social media have transformed the compute resource requirements of the data center.
The Flex Series GPU media architecture, powered by up to four X^e Media Engines, focuses on the highest stream density demands for the modern data center without compromising quality:

• • Delivers five times media transcode throughput, two times decode throughput at half the power (Intel Flex Series 140 GPU compared to Nvidia A10).
  • Delivers up to 36 streams 1080p60 transcode throughput per card.
  • Delivers eight streams 4K60 transcode throughput per card
  • When scaled to 10 cards in a 4U server configuration, it can support up to 360 streams HEVC-HEVC 1080p60 transcode throughput.