For the past few years, AMD and NVIDIA have indisputably been the ones leading the charge in the graphics card market, but with chipmaker giant Intel soon stepping into the same arena, this could all be set to change. Since their announcement back in August last year, Intel has been working away on its own discrete graphics card dubbed the Xe DG1. However, because they’ve been keeping these graphics cards very close to their chest, as of this moment, we know very little about what to expect from Intel’s upcoming GPUs. Only that we can’t wait to get our hands on them!
What do we know about the Xe graphics cards?
The only thing we really know is that it’s very likely we’ll get to see Intel’s Xe graphics cards coming into the fray sometime in 2020. The actual release date is still under a bit of speculation, with some rumours suggesting we could see it as early as June 2020 and some erring on the side of a release much later in the year. Intel’s Senior Vice President of Architecture, Graphics, and Software and former AMD engineer, Raja Koduri teased the launch only last month with a cryptic tweet of a new personalised number plate that read “THINKXE” and an expiry date of June 2020, which may be grounds enough to support the theory.
A lot of potential and power
While we can’t pin down anything exact for the time being in terms of the GPU’s anticipated specs, what is possible is that their top end 512 Xe card could end up outperforming NVIDIA’s RTX 1080 Ti, based on some speculative estimates made by the tech enthusiast community, which gives us an idea of anticipated performance. More recently, there’s also been evidence to suggest that Intel is intent on implementing multi-GPU technology with its Xe GPUs. This could enable people to double up on their graphics cards to achieve more power, while creating an easier upgrade path by splitting the cost over two different purchases. It could also mean that anyone using both Intel CPUs and GPUs in tandem could see even greater benefit, as the graphics card would work with the integrated graphics within the processor to aid more complex tasks.
It’s alive!
Last week, Intel’s Senior Director of Discrete Graphics and Visual Technologies Marketing and another former AMD employee, Chris Hook tweeted that the discrete Xe graphics cards are “alive!”, having been officially powered on and now in a functional working state. We’re very excited to hear the new GPUs are currently being tested, and are looking forward to seeing exactly what they can do next year. Adding to the good news, Intel has also confirmed they are on track to release their first 7nm GPU in 2021, something we’re equally anxious to see.
If you’d like to find out more about Intel’s new discrete Xe graphics cards or discover how you can take advantage of the GPUs within our range of Rack and Mini PCs, please get in touch.
