The GPU Flex Series is Intel’s answer to one of the biggest pain points in the entire virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) market – allowing customers to take advantage of this available GPU without paying licensing fees.
Companies are increasingly turning to VDI systems to give employees a cost-effective way to access essential apps and services from anywhere. On that front, there are plenty of great remote desktop and virtualization software solutions to choose from.
But as many modern workloads also require increasingly more resources, they are turning to GPU-powered virtual desktop systems to support their remote workers. The problem? It costs to license the best GPUs that power them, but that’s where Intel’s Flex GPU family comes into the picture.
Removing GPU-powered VDI from licensing costs
These GPUs are tailor-made for VMware ESXi environments and supplemented with the VMware Horizon connection manager. They are available for use without hidden virtualization licensing fees.
Businesses can take advantage of two configurations of Intel’s license-free Flex GPUs. The Intel Data Center GPU Flex 140 is a 75W PCIe Gen 4 single-width add-in with 12GB GDDR and 8 TFLOPS of peak computing power. The Intel Data Center GPU Flex 170, meanwhile, is a 150W iteration with 16GB of memory and can hit 16 TFLOPS.
The Flex 140 can support up to 12 VDI sessions per GPU, while the Flex 170 can support 16, according to Intel’s testing.
Both feature ray tracing, as well as a built-in AV1 encoder, which Storage overview says this is the first GPU with this feature. This significantly increases printing efficiency in AVC and HEVC formats, with a 30% bandwidth improvement.
VMware previously announced it would support Flex GPUs in its VMware Horizon VDI service, with Intel announcing the availability last month at its Intel Innovation 2023 event.