In the annual report, which first appeared on the Intel website in February of this year, the company, for not entirely obvious reasons, calls the discrete graphics solution being developed βthe first in its history,β although industry development experts may remember that Intel tried its luck with discrete video cards back in mid-nineties of the last century. In essence, Intel's development of a next-generation discrete graphics solution is an attempt to return to a market segment that it left about twenty years ago.
The activity in highlighting this process is simply unprecedented. Intel hosts customer engagement events to listen to customer concerns. Former AMD graphics chief Raja Koduri is just one of many significant figures who have been brought in to create or inform Intel's discrete graphics solutions. At the very least, Intel continues to lure marketing and public relations specialists not only from AMD, but also from NVIDIA.
Chris Hook, who heads the marketing efforts for discrete graphics, also moved to Intel from AMD, and he is no longer shy about making loud statements. For example, on his Twitter page there is an entry about the timing of the appearance of the first discrete Intel products of the new generation on sale. This should happen, according to him, by the end of 2020.
Discrete graphics Intel will follow an evolutionary path
The fact that Intelβs discrete graphics will use developments in the integrated field became clear last year, when Raja Koduri, at an event for the media and analysts, showed a slide with the βevolutionary curveβ of the development of Intel graphics solutions. In this illustration, following the Gen11 integrated graphics, there was a conditional family of Intel Xe solutions, which will also include discrete products. Chris Hook at that moment was forced to clarify that βIntel Xeβ is not a trademark or symbol of a specific family, but a general name for a concept that implies βend-to-end scalingβ of graphics solutions from the most economical to the most productive.
Later, hints of Intelβs readiness to use architectural blocks of integrated graphics to create discrete ones were heard in public speeches by various company representatives, but the recent quarterly reporting conference was decorated in this regard new CEO Robert Swan, who emphasized the growing importance of discrete graphics to the company's business in the future.
According to him, the evolution of computing workloads is pushing towards the use of highly parallel architectures, and graphics processors are best suited for this, as well as programmable matrices and specialized accelerators. For this reason, Intel decided to invest in discrete graphics. The upcoming premiere, however, will be the debut of a new generation integrated graphics solution, the capabilities of which are very inspiring to Intel representatives. Apparently, we are talking about Gen11, which we will talk about later.
The discrete solutions introduced in 2020, according to Swan, will find application in both the client and server segments. The head of Intel confirmed that the brand's discrete graphics processors will use time-tested architectural solutions that have proven themselves in the integrated graphics segment. Using graphics familiar from Core CPUs, the company hopes to create "truly compelling products," as Swan summed it up.
Gen11 - Ubiquitous Integrated Graphics Intel
The forerunner of Intel's new generation of discrete graphics should be the Gen11 graphics architecture, which will find wide application in mobile processors of various families. The closest thing to an announcement, judging by the comments of Intel management at yesterdayβs conference, are mobile 10nm Ice Lake processors, which will acquire the status of serial products at the end of this quarter, but will begin to be shipped in significant quantities only by the fourth quarter of this year.
The next Gen11 integrated graphics carriers are highly integrated mobile 10nm Lakefield processors using the advanced Foveros layout, which allows crystals manufactured according to different lithographic standards to be placed on the same substrate. Intel representatives previously noted that Lakefield processors will be released after Ice Lake processors, and schematic illustrations of their layout suggest the use of a version of Gen11 graphics with reduced power consumption in Lakefield.
Another 10nm Intel mobile processor with Gen11 graphics may debut by the end of next year. We are talking about processors of the Elkhart family, which will replace Gemini Lake in the segment of nettops, netbooks and industrial computers. Not much is known about the Elkhart processors themselves, but their support is already implemented in Linux drivers, as is the case with Ice Lake. In addition, mobile processors of the latest family are regularly mentioned in customs documents on the EEC website, since engineering samples are registered for import into the territory of the countries of the Eurasian Economic Union.
Perhaps such widespread use of the Gen11 graphics subsystem will allow Intel to more easily create next-generation scalable graphics. Representatives of the company responsible for the integration of components recently explained that they consider it reasonable to use a multi-chip processor layout in the discrete graphics segment. In this case, the effectiveness of the modular approach will depend on the presence of a high-speed interface between the chips and the ability of engineers to competently implement heat removal.
Source: 3dnews.ru