The Intel Xe GPU will be its first foray into discrete graphics since the ill-fated Larrabee project many years ago. But forget that, let’s not dwell on the past, this is a bright new future for Intel graphics cards, and potentially PC gamers too, as it means we’re going to have a genuine third player in the GPU market and that can only be a good thing.

Intel’s Xe GPU was effectively announced last August via a teaser tweet promising to “set our graphics free” with a discrete graphics card in 2020. But it wasn’t until December 2018, at the company’s Architecture Day, that we found out the actual name Intel had chosen for its new GPU venture: Xe.

It didn’t really reveal a whole lot about the underlying graphics tech at the event, besides the fact that it’s pronounced X-E, and not Zee as I can’t help but do. That’s the problem with having both Xe and Xeon in your product portfolio and not following the same phonetics…

But that doesn’t mean we don’t know a fair bit about the new entry into the PC graphics card market. Well, we at least have a few scurrilous rumours, some genuine leaks, some information direct from the big ‘zilla itself, and a few educated guesstimates to whet our appetites for what this year has to offer.

Yes, Intel is going to release a discrete graphics card for the gaming market this year, and it looks like the early engineering samples are already on their way out to developers too. The first Intel Xe card’s even appeared in an online graphics benchmarking database to prove it can actually power up. For those of us who waited through the Larrabee debacle it’s rather exciting to be able to say that.

VITAL STATS
Intel Xe release date
We’re thinking that. between a tweet from Raja Koduri and some ‘insider sources.’ we’re looking at a summer 2020 release for the new discrete Intel Xe graphics cards.

Intel Xe specs
Intel has announced three distinct microarchitectures for the Xe family of GPUs. There will be Xe-LP, Xe-HP, and Xe-HPC covering Intel graphics silicon from integrated and entry-level chips, all the way up to exascale high-performance computing. It looks likely that the initial Xe GPUs will largely be based on the building blocks put in place by the Ice Lake Gen11 graphics architecture. And we’re expecting a 96 EU Xe-LP DG1 chip first, with 128 EU, 256 EU, and 512 EU Xe-HP parts for the enthusiast and datacentre markets to follow.

Intel Xe performance
Not a lot is known about the potential performance of the new Intel graphics cards, but Gen11 GPUs with just 64 EUs are capable of decent 720p gaming. So with many times that figure, the Intel Xe could be genuinely competitive cards. If they clock high enough…

Intel Xe price
Spanning entry-level, mid-range, and high-end, you’re looking at a spread of graphics card pricing potentially from $200 all the way up to $1,000… depending on actually how powerful that 512 EU card turns out to be.

WHAT IS THE INTEL XE RELEASE DATE?
Our best guess for the Intel Xe release date is June 2020. That’s based on a couple of things with Raja Koduri, the popular public face of Intel’s renewed push into the discrete graphics card market, tweeting out a picture that’s widely believed to be some sort of launch window tease, as well as another source suggesting a mid-2020 release.

Intel CEO, Bob Swan, has announced the first discrete Xe card, DG1, has completed its power-on testing, and early dev kits have been listed on the EEC database. So things are definitely moving, and hopefully that also means they’re on track.

Raja Koduri was once AMD’s GPU engineering maestro, before switching allegiance around the end of 2017. After taking a leave of absence after the launch of Vega, he announced his decision to leave AMD “to pursue my passion beyond hardware,” a pursuit which took him straight into the arms of Intel and its hardware…

Now he heads up the company’s Core and Visual Computing group, and is driving forward the cause of discrete GPUs. The pun is fully intended, with Raja recently tweeting out a picture of his Tesla with a new license plate reading “THINKXE”.

⁦@IntelGraphics⁩ pic.twitter.com/T2symDHxJ7

— Raja Koduri (@Rajaontheedge) October 4, 2019

The little nugget which has caused people to cite this as a release date teaser is the expiry date reads June 2020. It could very well be a coincidence, and Koduri could just be showing off both his green credentials and love of a customised license plate, or it could be a little nod to the future of Intel graphics.

Then a subsequent DigiTimes report cited “industry sources” which claimed a mid-2020 Intel Xe release date, and which seems to tally quite nicely with the Raja tease too.

We also know Intel plans to ramp up into the data centre market with Xe in 2021 following the launch of its Ponte Vecchio GPU within the US Department of Energy’s Aurora supercomputer.



WHAT ARE THE INTEL XE SPECS?
Intel has announced that there are going to be three distinct GPU microarchitectures for Xe, covering the full breadth of chips from the lowest of the integrated pool, all the way up to super high-performance supercomputers.

“These three micro architectures,” says the chip maker, “allow Intel to scale the Xe architecture from low-power mobile (Xe-LP) up to exascale HPC applications (Xe-HPC).”

That low-power chip looks likely to be the basis of the initial Intel Xe DG1 GPU, the 96 EU part that was recently confirmed in EEC registration documents for new developer kits going out.

Although there has been talk of the Intel Xe GPU being built from the ground up, Intel’s Gregory Bryant has explained that its first discrete cards will be built from the building blocks of its existing graphics IP. And that means we’re expecting the Xe tech to essentially be the Gen11 GPU architecture of the new Ice Lake processors writ large.

Though at DevCon recently there has been more talk about the new GPU architectures, with mention of a variable vector width for the Xe design. That sounds a little like the way AMD’s new RDNA architecture has been designed to offer both high throughput as well as a huge amount of parallelism.



The way the current Intel graphics silicon is designed means it’s comprised of number of execution units (EUs) arrayed in groups of eight with some shared resources. That’s called a subslice, and there are are eight of these subslices grouped together to form a full slice, which shares L3 cache and the raster backend. This 8×8 makeup is what gives Ice Lake’s Gen11 GPU its full 64 execution unit count.

If you look at the design of a slice, on the surface at least, the block diagrams make it look a lot like a graphics processing cluster (GPC) from one of Nvidia’s recent GPUs. For subslice read SM, and for EU read CUDA core. Each of Intel’s execution units contains a pair of arithmetic logic units (ALU), which support both floating point and integer operations, while Nvidia CUDA cores contain one fixed FP and one INT unit. In that sense Intel’s low level GPU design is closer to AMD’s Graphics Core Next, or Navi RDNA execution units.



They are different beasts – and comparing Intel execution unit count to CUDA cores, or RDNA cores, is a bit of an apples vs. oranges vs. pomegranate comparison – but you can see how Intel could bring multiple slices together to create larger, more powerful graphics chips with its existing design.

Back in July Intel published a developer version of its graphics drivers which featured a bunch of different codenames. It was quickly taken down, but such is the way of the interwebs, a user on the Anandtech forums posted them all. The key entries from the perspective of Intel Xe are the ones under the DG1 and DG2 headers.

Posted: Jan 06, 2020 9:36 am
Related Forum: PC Building Forum

Source: https://www.pcgamesn.com/intel/xe-gpu-release-date-graphics-card-specs-performance