Intel Gen12 iGPU on "Rocket Lake" will be Slimmer than the one on "Tiger Lake"?

[btarunr]

The Gen12 Xe integrated graphics component of the upcoming "Rocket Lake-S" desktop processor will be slimmer than the one on the upcoming 10 nm "Tiger Lake" silicon, according to a Geekbench hardware detection unearthed by TUM_APISAK. An 8-core/16-thread "Rocket Lake-S" sample surfaced on the Geekbench database, which shows the iGPU to feature 32 compute units as read by the OpenCL benchmark (corresponding with 32 execution units), compared to 96 on the "Tiger Lake-U" mobile processor die. The iGPU is also clocked rather conservatively on this ES, at at 1.15 GHz. The CPU component, on the other hand, ticks at 3.20 GHz, boosting up to 4.30 GHz. It's likely that with the power budget of the desktop platform, the iGPU will be able to sustain boost frequencies better.



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[watzupken]

I think it makes sense to not have a high end iGPU on a high end desktop chip. You either get people who are not fuss about using iGPU with high end chip because whatever they run are not graphically intensive, or, people who buy a high end chip that wants high end graphics which the highest end iGPU is not going to be enough.

 

[ppn]

tiger lake ~~146mm2, backported to 14nm ~~300mm2, and that is just the quad. so it makes sense to start cutting things.

 

[Assimilator]

Well RKL is 8 cores @ 14nm, TGL is only 4 @ 10nm which means TGL has a lot more available die area. Further TGL is targeted at mobile first, so it makes sense for it to have a beefier iGPU to prevent manufacturers from having to tack a power-hungry dGPU on.

 

[newtekie1]

They could cut the desktop iGPU down to almost nothing as long as it outputs video at 4k and plays 4k media thats all it needs to do.

 

[londiste]

They could cut the desktop iGPU down to almost nothing as long as it outputs video at 4k and plays 4k media thats all it needs to do.

Are you sure that would be almost nothing? If I remember correctly in something like 24EU UHD630 the EUs take up about a third of the space or less. 64EU Ice Lake iGPU should be even worse. iGPU contains a lot of ASICs to help with exactly that "outputs video at 4k and plays 4k media" part among other things.

 

[Darmok N Jalad]

I'm curious if Intel will continue to press the IGP like they tried to do with Ice Lake. A good IGP was a noble effort when they had clear wins in the CPU space. AMD is eating their lunch now, and I'm sure the toughest questions from investors are not about Intel's IGP, but when they will get back to leading in the CPU arena. No sense waisting the die space until they can get a smaller node actually working as intended. I also bet that Apple was pushing Intel for better IGPs for their MacBook lineup, and it is now too little too late there.