Revealed this week at the 2025 OCP Global Summit, ‘Crescent Island’ marks the beginning of Intel’s annual cadence of GPU releases that follows similar pushes by Nvidia and AMD after dealing with more than 15 years of missteps in the accelerator chip segment.
Intel on Tuesday revealed a 160-GB, energy-efficient data center GPU that is part of a new annual GPU release cadence to deliver on the chipmaker’s new strategy of providing open systems and software architecture for AI systems.
Code-named “Crescent Island,” the GPU is “power- and cost-optimized” for inference workloads running on air-cooled enterprise servers, according to Intel. The GPU features Intel’s Xe3P microarchitecture that is optimized for performance-per-watt, 160 GB of LPDDR5X memory and support for a broad range of data types.
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The semiconductor giant said it plans to start sampling Crescent Island with customers in the second half of 2026. Until then, Intel is developing and testing what it’s calling an open and unified software stack for heterogeneous AI systems on the company’s Arc Pro B-Series GPUs to “enable early optimizations and iterations.”
The announcement confirms CRN’s previous reporting last month that Intel had an unannounced GPU design with a lower power requirement for servers on its road map that could arrive next year at some point.
Intel did not provide an update on “Jaguar Shores,” the next-generation GPU announced earlier this year that the company is designing for rack-scale platforms.
In a briefing with journalists last month, Sachin Katti, Intel’s chief AI and technology officer, said that Crescent Island has “enhanced memory bandwidth” and “lots of memory capacity,” making it a “fantastic product for token clouds and enterprise-level inference.”
Revealed this week at the 2025 OCP Global Summit, Crescent Island marks the beginning of a new annual cadence of GPU releases that Intel announced last week during its major press push around its forthcoming “Panther Lake” and “Clearwater Forest” CPUs.
Following similar pushes by Nvidia and AMD over the last two years to move to annual release strategies, this represents Intel’s latest push to gain a foothold in the Nvidia-dominated AI infrastructure market after more than 15 years of missteps in the accelerator chip segment that spanned across the company’s last four CEOs.
Katti, who was appointed by Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan in April to lead the company’s new AI strategy, said the chipmaker is building its new vision for the AI hardware market around an open systems and software architecture that will deliver the “right-sized” and “right-priced” compute needed to power future agentic AI workloads.
“We will be building scalable heterogeneous systems that deliver that zero friction experience to agentic AI workloads and can deliver on the best performance-per-dollar for these workloads by leveraging this open heterogeneous architecture,” he said.
Katti (pictured above) said this open approach will give customers and partners “choice at the systems and the hardware layer,” with opportunities for multiple vendors to partake.
“As we bring more and more disruptive technologies to the table, we can insert it into this open, heterogeneous architecture,” he said last month.
