Intel has started shipments of its Arctic Sound-M graphics and video transcoding card for data centers, the company said this week. The board leverages Intel’s ‘Big Arc Alchemist' ACM-G10 GPU, the chip that will power Intel's upcoming performance-mainstream and high-end Arc A500- and Arc A700-series graphics boards for gamers.
"Intel Data Center GPU, codenamed Arctic Sound-M, is now shipping," a statement by Intel over Twitter reads. "This open and flexible GPU will support a diverse range of workloads starting with cloud gaming and media streaming. We can't wait to see our customers' innovative solutions come to life!"
Intel's codenamed Arctic Sound-M graphics and video transcoding card for data centers uses the ACM-G10 GPU with up to 32 Xe cores (equal to up to 4,096 stream processors) and 16GB of memory. Intel's ACM-G10 graphics processor can handle transcoding of up to eight simultaneous 4K video streams, 30+ 1080p streams, and rendering of 40+ game streams. As a bonus, Intel's higher-end Arc Alchemist GPUs also support XMX instructions so that they can accelerate AI inference workloads.
It is unclear which companies are getting Intel's new Arctic Sound-M graphics and video transcoding board. Still, we are talking about usual cloud suspects who provide game and video streaming services.
The key takeaway about Intel’s Arctic Sound-M shipments is that the company is sure that its drivers and software stack for the ACM-G10 graphics processor is good enough for data centers, which essentially means the remote rendering of select games as video transcoding. End-users tend to have somewhat different requirements as they play a more comprehensive range of games and use a broader selection of applications. Therefore, while there is no direct correlation between the readiness of the data center and end-user software, the readiness of the former is a good sign overall.
It should be noted that Intel's Arctic Sound-M family also includes the company's high-density multi-purpose Arctic Sound-M board powered by two 'small' ACM-G11 GPUs that can serve the same purpose as the single-chip one. Intel's point on Twitter is deliberately furnished with the single-chip card, so we are talking about a particular product. Unfortunately, we have no idea whether Intel is shipping its multi-purpose dual-chip Arctic Sound-M. Still, we can speculate that customers who already use Intel's Server GPU based on two Iris Xe discrete GPUs might be interested in its successor.
