Intel Arctic Sound Accelerators Pictured – Up to 7680 Xe Cores Reported

Intel’s planning to become a major player within the GPU market, and that effort is taking the company on a two-pronged approach with their Xe graphics architecture. Intel needs high-end accelerators for HPC workloads and high-end gaming-grade and workstation-grade graphics products for consumers, and all of those workloads require market-specific optimisations.  

With Arctic Sound, Intel’s ambitions were high, a tile-based GPU design that can deliver scalable performance across multiple GPU/accelerator chips to deliver tremendous performance numbers. Thanks to Igor’s Lab, we have gotten a look at the company’s 1T and 2T HPC accelerator cards. 

Intel’s 1T and 2T naming scheme isn’t difficult to decipher, standing for 1-Tile and 2-Tile, respectively. Strangely, Intel’s long-teased 4-Tile Arctic Sound variant is a no-show, suggesting that Intel’s Arctic Sound Accelerators have been facing production issues. 

Arctic Sound reportedly relies on high-speed HBM2E memory, with each tile featuring 16GB of the high-speed memory type. This gives each accelerator tile access to 716 GB/s of bandwidth. 

Intel’s 1T setup reportedly features a TDP of 150W, offering users 384 usable Execution Units (EUs) out of a total of 512. Igor’s Lab suggests that Intel is running into yield issues with their Arctic Sound silicon, resulting in non-peak EU counts and lower clock speed/power targets. 

With 8 shader units per Execution Unit, Intel’s 1T arctic Sound Accelerator will feature 3072 shaders. Intel’s Arctic Sound Accelerators reportedly use a PCIe 4.0 interface and feature no display outputs.