Intel Xe

Intel Xe (stylized as Xe, unofficially "Gen 12"[1]) is general purpose GPU (GPGPU) and discrete GPU (dGPU) product line under development by Intel, reportedly codenamed Arctic Sound.

Intel Xe includes a new instruction set architecture – the technology is expected to become available with Intel's Tiger Lake products.

History

Intel Xe is not Intel's first attempt at a dedicated graphics card, that being the Intel740,[2] released in February 1998. Released to a hyped audience the Intel740 was a dissapointment and failure, being discontinued just 18 months after release but its technology lived on the Intel Extreme Graphics lineup.[3] Intel made another attempt with the Larrabee (microarchitecture) before cancelling it in 2009,[4] this time the technology developed was used in the Xeon Phi which was discontinued in 2020.[5]

In April 2018, it was reported that Intel was assembling a team to develop discrete graphics processing units, targeting both datacenters, as well as the PC gaming market, and therefore competitive with products from both Nvidia and AMD.[6] Rumors supporting the claim included that the company had vacancies for over 100 graphics-related jobs, and had taken on former Radeon Technologies Group (AMD) leader Raja Koduri in late 2017 – the new product was reported to be codenamed "Arctic Sound".[6] The project was reported to have initially been targeting video streaming chips for data centers, but had its scope expanded to include desktop GPUs.[6]

In June 2018, Intel confirmed it planned to launch a discrete GPU in 2020.[7]

In September 2019, hothardware.com reported that the Xe graphics (formally as "Gen 12") would represent a large change in the instruction set architecture (ISA) of Intel's GPUs, with practically all instruction encodings being altered.[8] The Xe graphics ISA is expected to ship with the Tiger Lake product line.[8]

The first functional discrete "Xe" GPU, codenamed "DG1", was reported as having begun testing in October 2019.[9]

According to a report by hexus.net in late 2019, a discrete GPU would launch in mid 2020; combined GPU/CPU (GPGPU) products were also expected, for data center and autonomous driving applications. The product is expected to be initially built on a 10 nm node (with 7 nm products in 2021) and use Intel's Foveros die stacking packaging technology (see 3D die stacking).[10]

Intel officially announced their Xe general HPC/AI GPU codenamed Ponte Vecchio on November 17, 2019. The chip is to use Intel's 'Embedded Multi-Die Interconnect Bridge' (EMIB) and Foveros die stacking packaging on a 7 nm node. The new GPU is expected to be used in Argonne National Laboratory's new exascale supercomputer, Aurora, with compute nodes comprising two Intel Xeon (Sapphire Rapids) CPUs, and six Ponte Vecchio GPUs.[11][12]

gollark: Still, I suppose you're right, they could probably afford to find decent products for the bigger categories.
gollark: I suspect they have more categories than that given that there seem to be "amazon's choice" products available in even really niche tiny categories.
gollark: .
gollark: That *would* still require them to manually go over them in every category, and there are a lot of categories and subcategories. It would be nice if they actually explained what "amazon's choice" means, though, and had a separate one for "known good" stuff
gollark: They have quite a lot of categories, though. I suppose for broader ones they could probably have a few featured products, perhaps with video reviews and extra docs and stuff.

See also

References
  1. Cutress, Ian (12 December 2018), "Intel's Architecture Day 2018: The Future of Core, Intel GPUs, 10nm, and Hybrid x86", www.anandtech.com, p. 5, Intel will use the Xe branding for its range of graphics that were unofficially called ‘Gen12’ in previous discussions
  2. https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/9/21058422/intel-dg1-discrete-gpu-graphics-card-announcement-ces-2020
  3. https://www.tomshardware.com/amp/picturestory/693-intel-graphics-evolution.html
  4. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-intel/intel-scraps-graphics-chip-based-on-larrabee-idUSTRE5B51QR20091206?type=technologyNews
  5. https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/290963-intel-quietly-kills-off-xeon-phi
  6. Evangelho, Jason (11 Apr 2018), "Intel Is Developing A Desktop Gaming GPU To Fight Nvidia, AMD", www.forbes.com
  7. Hill, Brandon (12 June 2018), "Intel To Power Up Its First Discrete GPU Confirmed For 2020 Launch", hothardware.com
  8. Hill, Brandon (9 Sep 2019), "Intel Says Tiger Lake Gen12 Xe Graphics Is Its Biggest Architectural Revamp In A Decade", hothardware.com
  9. Allan, Darren (26 Oct 2019), "Intel's first Xe graphics card is officially 'alive' and coming for AMD and Nvidia", ww.techradar.com
  10. Tyson, Mark (16 Oct 2019), "Industry sources say discrete Intel Xe cards will arrive mid-2020", hexus.net
  11. Intel Unveils New GPU Architecture with High-Performance Computing and AI Acceleration, and oneAPI Software Stack with Unified and Scalable Abstraction for Heterogeneous Architectures (press release), Intel, 17 Nov 2019
  12. Cutress, Ian (17 Nov 2019), "Intel's Xe for HPC: Ponte Vecchio with Chiplets, EMIB, and Foveros on 7nm, Coming 2021", www.anandtech.com
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