Intel has stepped back into the dedicated GPU industry, making a comeback after 1998. The competition in the GPU market is already very high, and with NVIDIA’s RTX 3000 series and AMD’s Big Navi also coming out soon, Intel has to bring out something really special to capture people’s attention which is where the rumored Intel Xe GPUs come into play.
According to rumors, Intel plans to release the full lineup in August. An Intel driver leak in the summer of 2019 referenced four different discrete graphics cards. So far, the Xe DG1 name has been leaked for one of the discrete GPUs. However, this card will be a low-power discrete GPU for laptops and not an add-in card for desktops.
Intel announced that the Xe range will have three distinct categories. The Xe HPC, Xe HP, and Xe LP. The Xe HPC are High-performance GPUs designed for data centers and supercomputing. Xe HP High-performance GPUs will target PC gamers, enthusiasts, workstations, and professionals. Xe LP Low-performance GPUs will be entry-level cards and integrated graphics.
While Intel has been out of the discrete GPU game for a long time, they have developed integrated graphics for their CPUs for a long time. The Xe lineup will be based on the same 12th-generation architecture used at the core of its integrated graphics for upcoming CPU generations like Tiger Lake, but of course, the specs will be scaled.
Intel’s Integrated GPU architecture uses a tile-based design and this will most probably be the case in the Xe lineup too. The iGPUs in the 11th gen architecture has a maximum of 2 tiles. The number of tiles for the Xe lineup will be double to 4, according to leaks from July 2019.
Intel has also claimed that they are developing GPUs for all types of consumer price points. Designs include TDP ranging from 75 watts up to 300 watts. Another leaked benchmark shows that DG1 is supposedly based on Intel’s Xe-LP design, packing only 96 EUs which equals 768 shader cores. That translates to about 2.3 teraflops. That puts it in league with Nvidia’s GTX 1050 Ti GPU. Listed as “Sandra,” the benchmark also lists 3GB of VRAM and 1MB of L2 cache.
Raja Koduri, Chief Officer of Intel’s Discrete GPU division said in a now-removed interview that the Xe cards could be using HBM (High bandwidth memory). Intel has since then downplayed these rumors. We will have to wait and see what type of memory the Xe series will have.
Some leaked internal documents of Intel showed that the Xe series will support PCI Express gen 4.0. Intel has also shown intent for having Ray tracing support in their future GPUs. We will have to wait and see what Intel reveals and we don’t have to wait that long if the leaked August date is true.
