Intel begins customer sampling of D-Series GPUs, expands AI infrastructure

Intel has started putting its new D-Series data center GPUs into customers’ hands for testing. The chips mark the company’s latest attempt to win a meaningful slice of the AI hardware market. The pitch is not about building the biggest, fastest training monster on the block. Intel is aiming at AI inference, the part of the job where trained models actually answer questions. What Intel is shipping The D-Series was previously known by its codename, Crescent Island. It is built on Intel’s Xe3P architecture. The flagship model is the D270. Intel is positioning it for AI inference and agentic workloads, meaning AI systems that take multi-step actions instead of answering a single prompt and stopping. On paper, the D270 delivers a peak compute of approximately 1.3 PFLOPs at FP8 precision. FP8 is a lower-precision number format that trades a bit of numerical detail for much faster math. That performance comes with a thermal design power of 350W. Under the hood, the chip packs 32 Xe3P cores and 256 XMX engines. The XMX engines are Intel’s dedicated matrix-math units, which handle the heavy multiplication that neural networks run on. A unified 32 MB L2 cache ties the design together. The me...