Intel Xe

Intel's first attempt at a dedicated graphics card was the Intel740,[5] released in February 1998. Released to a hyped audience, the Intel740 was a disappointment and failure due to its performance being below expectations, being discontinued just 18 months after release. However, its technology lived on in the Intel Extreme Graphics lineup.[6] Intel made another attempt with the Larrabee architecture before cancelling it in 2009;[7] this time, the technology developed was used in the Xeon Phi, which was discontinued in 2020.[8]

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.[9] 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".[9] The project was reported to have initially been targeting video streaming chips for data centers, but had its scope expanded to include desktop GPUs.[9]

In June 2018, Intel confirmed it planned to launch a discrete GPU in 2020.[10]

In September 2019, hothardware.com reported that the Xe graphics (formally "Gen 12") would represent a large change in the instruction set architecture (ISA) of Intel's GPUs, with practically all instruction encodings being altered.[11] The Xe graphics ISA is expected to ship with the Tiger Lake product line.[11]

The first functional discrete "Xe" GPU, codenamed "DG1", was reported as having begun testing in October 2019.[12]

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).[13]

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.[14][15]

In August 2020, Intel was reported to be shipping Xe DG1 GPUs for a possible late 2020 release, while also commenting on a DG2 GPU aimed at the enthusiast market. The DG1 is also sold as the Iris Xe MAX and as Iris Xe Graphics (stylized as iRIS X^e) in laptops, while cards for developers are sold as the DG1 SDV.[16][17]

The Xe MAX is an entry-level GPU that was first released on November 1, 2020 in China and is similar in most aspects to the integrated GPU found in Tiger Lake processors, the only differences being a higher clock speed, slightly higher performance and dedicated memory and a dedicated TDP requirement. It competes with Nvidia's entry-level Geforce MX series of GPUs. It is aimed at slim and highly portable productivity laptops and has 4GB of dedicated LPDDR4X-4266 memory with a 128-bit wide memory bus, has 96 EUs, 48 texture units, 24 ROPs, a peak clock speed of 1650 MHz and a performance of 2.46 FP32 teraFLOPs with a 25w TDP. By comparison, the integrated GPU in Tiger Lake processors has a performance of 2.1 FP32 teraFLOPs.[18][19] The Xe MAX does not replace the system's integrated GPU; instead it was designed to work alongside it, so tasks are split between the integrated and discrete GPUs.[20] It is initially available on only 3 laptops: The Asus VivoBook Flip 14 TP470, the Acer Swift 3X, and the Dell Inspiron 15 7000. Intel Xe MAX GPUs can only be found on systems with Tiger Lake processors.

Desktop versions of the Xe MAX were expected to be released in early 2021 exclusively to OEMs for use in low-cost desktop computers. Such computers are expected to have graphics that are better than those offered by integrated GPUs while saving on costs and allowing OEMs to advertise the dedicated GPU in such systems.[21]

Intel officially announced Intel Iris Xe Graphics desktop cards for OEMs and system integrators(SI) on January 26, 2021. It is aimed at mainstream desktop and business PCs as an improvement over other graphics options in AV1 video decoding, HDR (High Dynamic Range) video support and deep learning inference, and is not as powerful as its laptop counterpart, with only 80 enabled EUs. The first cards are made by Asus, have DisplayPort 1.4, HDMI 2.0, Dual Link DL-DVI-D outputs and are passively cooled.[22][23][24]

• Larrabee (microarchitecture)
• Intel graphics