Senior vice president of Intel’s discrete graphics division, Raja Koduri, teased some photos of the “Arctic Sound” Intel Xe discrete graphics processing units on Twitter over here, and under this Tweet.
These GPU die pictures are taken from the XE labs in Folsom (USA), though these photos don’t give us any info on the alleged specs/performance of these discrete graphics cards. We have three different Xe-based products pictured, along with their cooling solutions.
The first product in this picture (as shown below on the left side) was already teased by Raja before, which is supposed to be the Xe-HP based data center accelerator. On the right hand side one small silicon product along with a massive GPU die in the bottom can be seen as well. The smaller top right product could be Intel’s DG1 (or DG2), whereas the big one in the bottom appears to be the “Arctic Sound” prototype model.
These are likely to use a multichip approach (tiles), e.g. three tile-configurations, i.e. 1, 2 and 4 tile-based products (as shown below). Rumors have indicated that Arctic Sound should come with 4 tiles.
Raja also refers the big chip as BFP, Big ‘Fabulous’ Package, which is the Xe HPC-based data center accelerator. Raja Koduri can be seen holding the “BFP Xe GPU” as shown below in this picture.
These are photos of the Intel’s DG1 testing platform (left), and the BFP testing platform on the right.
The Intel Xe GPU architecture is scalable and it will power various products. Intel plans to offer three microarchitectures derived from Xe which include the following:
- Intel Xe LP (Integrated + Entry / Mainstream Gaming)
- Intel Xe HP (Enthusiast, Workstation / Datacenter / AI)
- Intel Xe HPC (HPC Exascale).
Hello, my name is NICK Richardson. I’m an avid PC and tech fan since the good old days of RIVA TNT2, and 3DFX interactive “Voodoo” gaming cards. I love playing mostly First-person shooters, and I’m a die-hard fan of this FPS genre, since the good ‘old Doom and Wolfenstein days.
MUSIC has always been my passion/roots, but I started gaming “casually” when I was young on Nvidia’s GeForce3 series of cards. I’m by no means an avid or a hardcore gamer though, but I just love stuff related to the PC, Games, and technology in general. I’ve been involved with many indie Metal bands worldwide, and have helped them promote their albums in record labels. I’m a very broad-minded down to earth guy. MUSIC is my inner expression, and soul.
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Noice
Those dies are huge.
Indeed. I wonder how will the gaming cards pan out from Intel. If Intel used a multi-chip approach even for consumer cards, then that would be great.
At least Intel will be able to claim of having the longest and the widest GPUs.
If Intel beats the 13 SKUs of consumer Turing (discarding mobile units) then I’ll definitely be surprised.
So for gaming cards we only have 2 segments ? I presume “enthusiast” also refers to gaming ??
Intel Xe LP (Integrated + Entry / Mainstream Gaming)
Intel Xe HP (Enthusiast, Workstation / Datacenter / AI)
Integrated: interesting here, I assume Intel means APU powerhouse like 3200G/3400G.
Entry: something like 1650/5500XT.
Mainstream: 1660Ti/2060 and 5600XT/5700.
Enthusiast: 2070/2080/2080Ti and 5700XT/R7
The workstation stuff follows a Titan/Quadro and WX competitor.
Looks good!I like this!
Can’t wait to play Warcraft 3 in 1080p.
I hope Intel can really come to GPU markets properly. Nvidia is getting way too ahead of their competition which keeps the prices up
The idea of a socketed GPU is very fascinating though.
It’s not. That means you’d need a discrete support infrastructure for it, e.g. separate memory sticks, power supply system fit to run the given chip, which all will get expensive and complicated quick.
You already need to buy a new motherboard almost every time you want to install a more powerful CPU – imagine doing it more often to install a GPU