Friday, August 14th 2020
Xe HPG is Real, Intel's Gaming GPU Releases in 2021, without HBM
Intel on Thursday at its 2020 Architecture Day event announced a high performance gaming variant of its Xe graphics architecture, which it calls Xe HPG. The Xe architecture is designed to scale between tiny iGPUs and mobile discrete GPUs as Xe LP, up to scalar compute processors under Xe HP, and beyond to HPCs and supercomputers, under Xe HPC. The combination of the client graphics feature-set of Xe LP, with the scale of Xe HP, results in Xe HPG. Intel is designing Xe HPG for a third-party semiconductor foundry, and hopes to debut it in 2021.
In our older graphics detailing the Xe LP, we tried to explain just how easy it is for Intel scale up the iGPU to a discrete GPU SoC. This is done by simply dialing up the Xe slices, and dropping in dGPU ancillaries such as a PCI-Express host interface and memory controllers for the prevalent client-segment discrete graphics, namely GDDR6. There will be additional components, such as ray-tracing hardware. Intel is gunning for DirectX 12 Ultimate logo compliance, and ray-tracing forms a big part of that.Even before the Xe HPG, the first discrete GPU based on Xe is expected to be derivatives of Xe LP built on Intel's 10 nm SuperFin node, which are essentially the Xe LP iGPU of "Tiger Lake" spun out on dies of their own, with memory and PCIe interfaces. These should make up mobile discrete graphics cards that can augment performance of the Xe LP iGPU of notebooks with "Tiger Lake" processors.
In our older graphics detailing the Xe LP, we tried to explain just how easy it is for Intel scale up the iGPU to a discrete GPU SoC. This is done by simply dialing up the Xe slices, and dropping in dGPU ancillaries such as a PCI-Express host interface and memory controllers for the prevalent client-segment discrete graphics, namely GDDR6. There will be additional components, such as ray-tracing hardware. Intel is gunning for DirectX 12 Ultimate logo compliance, and ray-tracing forms a big part of that.Even before the Xe HPG, the first discrete GPU based on Xe is expected to be derivatives of Xe LP built on Intel's 10 nm SuperFin node, which are essentially the Xe LP iGPU of "Tiger Lake" spun out on dies of their own, with memory and PCIe interfaces. These should make up mobile discrete graphics cards that can augment performance of the Xe LP iGPU of notebooks with "Tiger Lake" processors.