Intel places four Xe-LP laptop GPUs on PCIe plug-in card for servers
Intel announces a plug-in card for servers with four Xe-LP GPUs on it. It concerns the GPUs that Intel also integrates in its Tiger Lake processors and uses for the Xe Max GPU for laptops. The server variant is combined with 8GB Lpddr4 per GPU.
According to Intel, the H3C XG310 add-in card is for running games in servers and then streaming them to mobile devices. Intel cites as an example a collaboration with the Chinese Tencent, which offers a streaming version of Arena of Valor. According to Intel, one add-in card can simultaneously process sixty streams of the game in a 720p resolution at 30fps.
The XG310 add-in card uses the PCIe 3.0 x16 interface and renders show that the card has one 8-pin power connector. Four Intel Xe-LP GPUs are placed on the pcb, each combined with 8GB Lpddr4 memory, for a total of 32GB. The Xe-LP GPUs each have 96 execution units and are made at 10nm.
Intel already uses the same GPU integrated in its most expensive Tiger Lake processors and as the separate Xe Max GPU for laptops. The latter has higher clock speeds than the igpu variant, but Intel does not mention the clock speeds of the server version. It is noticeable that the server version uses Lpddr4 instead of the faster Lpddr4x in the laptop version. However, the Xe Max for laptops has a maximum of 4GB vram.
Despite the use of four GPUs on one plug-in card, the graphics processing power is limited. Intel does not mention performance such as the number of teraflops, but it is known that these are laptop GPUs that individually perform about the same as Nvidia’s MX350 GPU. Nvidia and AMD also make GPU plug-in cards for servers. These offer much more computing power and are used, for example, for cloud gaming services such as Google Stadia and GeForce Now.
Intel also has powerful Xe GPUs for servers on its roadmaps, but they will be released later. The Xe-LP-GPU used for now is the slowest variant. This is followed by a Xe-HPG variant, which is intended for separate video cards. Its first test chips have been activated. The Xe-HP and Xe-HPC variants are the most powerful Intel GPUs, intended for servers and supercomputers.