Intel D270 GPU AI Accelerator–Up to 480 GB LPDDR5X
intel.com
intel.com
Right now I’m running 2x 3090 and 128 gb ram on 3.8 flash-next180b (the quant is 97gb) and it hums at120t/s. It’s really a surprisingly good model for general tasks, and I’m soon to see how it does with more agentic kit. For agentic work it does slow down quite a bit when the context fills up… but what do you want for running a 180b model on consumer hardware?
Right now I have it set up as an administrator for our asterisk PBX and radius server, and it does higher level judgment on our cctv footage for notifications to security. It’s been really good so far. Agents are the new UI, everything just works over SSH now.
Literally my first thought!
This is exactly why I interpret the aggressive price cutting by OpenAI on their Luna model line as a clear sign they are scared shitless of local models, and how they can trigger a "the king has no clothes" moment for AI companies like OpenAI.
Your electrical costs are likely less than mine though
It can be annoying when you're running something long and realize there is an issue. But hey, I'm not wasting paid tokens. Reset and try again. I've probably thought of a better way by then too.
The number of people with hardware to run a model like that is very small.
It's going to be many years before hardware to run medium size local models is widely available. Running mid-size local models doesn't even register as a factor in pricing decisions right now.
It's such a small part of the market and will be for many years, until RAM and other hardware prices come down.
That's not the problem anyone is facing, and analysis anyone is doing. At all.
The problem is the huge AI-related budget that companies who dove head first onto AI are facing.
Therefore the problem everyone is faced with boils down to whether they keep paying the likes of OpenAI a de-facto business tax, or they replace that tax with a one-off CapEx invoice followed by a utilities bill.
And you don't need a frontier model to do most things. In fact, the biggest challenge in using local models in agentic coding is the models supporting these agent-based tools.
> It's going to be many years before hardware to run medium size local models is widely available.
Nonsense. Speaking for myself, my employer already introduced a hard cap on AI credits while rolling out hardware support for local models, and even went to the extents of rolling out workstations with 64GB of RAM as a baseline. Consequently, we are using the likes of gemma4 for a fair share of everyday tasks. This has a transformative effect on your workflows because suddenly you don't ration tokens, and agent orchestration doesn't become a cash guzzler. So far the only constraints are tool support and token throughput, but that's not a concern.
True, but the number of people who pay the non-subsidized API price is also very small, and it's all in big companies who would have no issue buying or renting hardware for that purpose.
I don't think running a ~200B parameter model is that out of reach, it might be usual by the mid 2030s for people in the tech world. Factor in the crazy improvements in quality given a number of parameters too.
But there are a lot of companies who do and rent it out as a service.
I expect I’ll be able to run 1/2 terabyte models in 5 years for a couple $K in hardware. Inference is going to be a lot like Bitcoin mining. Only the peak of the power/performance curve is going to be profitable. Which means a glut of surplus hardware that can’t make money but makes tons of tokens.
Partially agree and partially disagree. Qwen 3.8 next (120b + 50b ngrams) is at the upper end of a local model, and serving it at good speeds (esp for pp) is not cheap. So no, oAI are not particularly scared that everyone will suddenly start using local models of this size / quality.
I do agree that having these models in the open is great pressure on the price point of "small" API models (like luna, haiku, etc). And that's good news for us consumers and for the field in general - more competition is always better.
And on the cost estimate, the true power of local models is the guarantee of running them on prem w/o any data going out. Price wise it is still cheaper to go API, for small teams.
> Or a cluster of consumer hw, and that comes with its own problems and drawbacks (esp in pp which matters a lot for agentic stuff).
Prefill actually ought to work well on a cluster AIUI, since it can leverage both pipeline parallelism and batching quite effectively.
Can't wait. Anyone has a idea of what the price now would be?
The press says amds price is 30-40 thousand dollars. On eBay there is exactly 1 going for close to 90 which is crazy because for that amount you could buy a MI350X and all the related hardware to actually use it and it has double the vram.
So I would peg it at 40-80 thousand dollars given it's Intel, and it's lpddr5 not hbm and not gddr7 so performance is likely to be lackluster.
Poorly-defined and ever-changing with occasional cases where a button does nothing, does something else, or deletes the whole prod database?
Idk. For a prototype they might be, but the whole reason we have this software thing going on is because we want some level of determinism.
What I meant though wasn’t agents building UX. I meant that in our case at least, the agent is the UX. “put a new extension 117 for Sam at the port next to Jane’s, and have it ring through to his cell when he’s not in the office. Leave the old 117 as is but only ring where Sam is, if that is known” basically, agents just do everything with SSH, and you can talk to them instead of poking around with a mouse. We don’t build ux for internal systems anymore. Local inference is strong enough to be reliable now with the correct tools and policies, and for 10-20k in hardware you are self contained. (Obviously $more if you are going to have a lot of people using it at the same time)
The “one wierd trick” is to build testing jugs for everything. Before a configuration is deployed, it’s tested against a toy instance, all existing functions are tested in all common cases, new functions verified, inputs fuzzed, adversarily abused, and stress tested against dummy loads. If its code, it gets examined against development policy, self containment, explicit interface walls, race conditions, code standards, complexity, factorability, and often A/B testing of different architectural choices. Except cryptography and a couple of other things, we generally prohibit the use of any libraries, it’s just not needed and the code never passes our tests anyway.
People are just YOLOing it and assuming that if it basically functions and looks right then it must be perfect. You’d have the same luck if you told your UX guy “test only the obvious, and if it looks about right at first glance, merge it. Don’t do extensive testing.”
The real thing with AI is that now you can afford to do a ridiculous amount of automated testing, setting up test fixtures, hardware simulators, mannequins of all the external interfaces, fuzzing, etc. Our testing code is 2-3x our product code, and we are shipping 10% of the bugs we shipped with humans, and it’s still 1/4 the cost and 4-10x the speed.
People shipping all the crap that is everywhere now have bad process engineering. Plain and simple. If you try to build software with AI like you used to with people, you’re going to have a bad time. The pipeline is very different.
But anyway.
I'm sure there are people that use the tech wrong. That can be said about any tech in existence.
If we aren't in that half, it's by sheer luck, and nothing else.
Agents (and LLMs) are inherently non-deterministic. In coding practice, this translates to garbage code in the long run. The solution is simple - make the process as deterministic, verifiable and rigid as possible. Suddenly, you get all the bonuses of agentic flows (insane initial speed, trivial cost, express iterations etc.) with none of the usual problems... and suddenly, humans have hard time matching the quality of the final artifact with hand-written code, because we suck at testing, fuzzing and debugging - because we're basically single-threaded and overfocused. Agents, OTOH, excel at it, and context management is also trivial compared to humans.
With AI, your iteration cycle gets 10x/100x quicker. For the same developer effort, you can effectively try out 10s of ideas the same period of time.
Iteration also has a human component. When a person works hard and writes the code, they are personally invested in its success. So iteration, or, chucking out someone’s hard work is psychologically damaging and causes human conflicts in teams. If AI wrote it, and AI deleted it, no-one gets upset. All that matters are good ideas. Reducing the human cost of iteration is just as important as the time saving.
And, now you have freed up implementation time, you now have way more time for testing, that thing that everyone wished they had more time to do, with a super intelligent 100x developer (ai) as your coding partner, and a 100x lever for automating regression testing. Bad UX has zero excuses.
This isn't something you'd be able to manage with a normal UI since every agent has its own at of settings. My agents come in sets, I usually change a set or multiple sets, 10-15 settings per agent. And my harness hasn't made a single mistake once I worked out all the kinks from MCP.
Funny as I'm using LLMs now to write UIs.
Marketing department asleep at the wheel.
A single B300 has almost 8 TB/s.
AMD MI300x from 2023 is 5.3 TB/s
Edit: my bad you are saying that this is an impressive number precisely because it is more or less normal RAM, not VRAM
And then GDDR7 backed off to PAM3 and sends 1.5 bits per cycle.
There's a good chance [LP]DDR will use the same techniques once it gets into the same speed range.
DDR has better latency hence the preference in CPU workloads where lower latency is more important due to variable workloads.
So yeah on its own not very impressive.
The large amount of memory means you can serve larger models, or less quantized, but that also means they're going to be slower due to the low bandwidth.
https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/geforce-rtx-5090.c4216
The marketing department doesn't have to lift a finger in this market. They could quietly drop it for sale without a single announcement and it would be backordered for a year.
They tasked an AI agent to it, like everyone else.
Not targeting me
It would work great on Qwen3.8-Flash-Next or GLM-5.3 as single user decode only hits a few experts, anything with concurrent users and you'd be sitting for a while.
You have to pretend it's for servers to keep investors happy, it would be banks and similar with in house servers that have to run local large models buying these for experiments and cybersecurity. Likely.
Interesting choice of words
"What software frameworks are relevant to Intel GPU D270?
Intel GPU D270 messaging should reference familiar AI software and serving frameworks such as PyTorch, vLLM, SGLang, and OpenAI Triton, where approved. This helps developers and platform teams understand how the product fits into existing AI workflows."
No. Certainly not now, maybe not ever. That is the least consumer-focused product page I've seen today.
You can work with 10 players that will buy all of them with minimal effort.
I know modern card architecture doesn't support this out of the box, but what is the actuall problem of forwarding a once-rendered frame to another card for output? Sureley DMA transfers PCIe->RAM->PCIe nowaday are fast enough to saturate 60fps at 4K?
While transfers have improved a lot the amount data needed for 4K60 with HDR is about 18Gbps. There's no way that doesn't have an impact.
I had a crazier setup in the past with the Intel i7-8809G APU: it had an AMD iGPU for desktop connected to the display, nVidia eGPU for games and the Intel iGPU for video encoding.
Of course there is additional latency due to frame copying, but I can’t notice it in practice.
> We want to render applications on the more powerful card and send the result to the card which has display connected.
edit: typo
Kind of disappointed that Intel is (probably) not going to release consumer class GPUs. Intel's driver stack was seriously getting mature—both on Linux and Windows. It's always nice to have a third option available.
Druid is still dead, consumer DGPUs are still, and workstation DGPUs also seems to be dead, and most of the Xe driver team for Windows was laid off, as well as most of the Xe chip design team.
Theres so much money to be made
Aren't you describing how a business operates?
I mean, doesn't Intel already hire people for those tasks? Unless you are worried about a specific bottleneck, increasing headcount and production output is what businesses do.
You can make a nice profit off of the enterprise space, but the big winners are the guys who put the work into servicing the consumer market.
Seems like neither a consumer product nor server. Maybe if they halve the ram and price it reasonably people with desktops will buy it for MoE like prosumer homelab AI enthusiast type situations?
The cost of a 480gb ram video card seems preposterous to be even marketing at this point.
Intel is going to make a card that costs $1 million dollars.. this is like industrial newsletters bleeding into a public forum
> Commercial Scale Pricing: In the industrial data center sector, battery storage systems are priced per kilowatt-hour (kWh) or megawatt-hour (MWh). Industrial battery storage installations typically cost $300,000 to $450,000+ per MWh of capacity depending on software integration, cooling systems, and structural framing.
Let's all get excited
I do hope this has a price point that makes it somewhat competitive with a Mac! Consumers have had nearly no choices available for mem capacity, and 20 channels of lpddr5 is one way to get that capacity! Go Intel!
This is almost twice better than RTX 5090. This GPU will not be prefill constrained, I feel.
But I am surprised that they were able to pack so much flops into 300W.
I'm not. When you're doing inference you typically reduce power limits anyway if you're optimizing for efficiency. Even if you don't, it doesn't spike to the max of the card.
My 3090 I power it down to 175W or so for single-digit reductions in performance for like, 60% of the wattage, something like that.
Next the tokens will be asking for tequila and caviar. Bow down to the new token overloads.