Intel Xe graphics cards: professional and gaming GPUs are tripping towards the start

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Intel's first gaming graphics card for decades is being tested by partners; the HPC model is similarly advanced. Expectations are kept high with small triple steps in which Intel allows the public to participate. This also fits in with the reanimation of the Odyssey marketing program, which has meanwhile been believed to be almost dead.

Participants in events in 2019 who still have their Odyssey card should register shortly receive new merchandise, which they should announce via social media channels in order to further promote expectations.

Intel's gaming graphics card as a sample for partners

Intel Xe-HPG, which stands for High Performance Gaming, is being developed under the code name DG2. This development has largely been completed, the fine-tuning is now being carried out with partners and the final test phase of the hardware and software begins. The solution should be officially presented in late autumn, but Intel has not yet announced an exact date.

Several desktop graphics cards are expected in addition to variants for the notebook, which is led by a 512 EU variant with its 4,096 shaders and 8 to 16 GB GDDR6. There should also be smaller variants with 384 EUs, 256 EUs, 192 EUs, 128 EUs and 64 EUs. The hope of the flagship rests on reaching at least the level of an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 or better, everything else should also be seen as a failure due to the expectations raised by Intel.

The view of the drivers remains no less skeptical. Intel has recently made great progress here, but there are still some construction sites, for example with the DG1 graphics card Intel Iris Xe Max, which is already commercially available. In the end, it is the combination of hardware and software that has to convince with the gaming model. The bar here is correspondingly high thanks to AMD and Nvidia, although they also have to struggle with some problems from time to time, especially Nvidia had to release hotfix drivers very often recently.

Intel Xe in June 2021 (Image: Intel)

One, if not two leagues above, Ponte Vecchio is preparing the start of the HPC solution. These have been running in the laboratory for some time, and the validation phase is progressing there. In addition to classic individual pieces, Intel also shows a picture of a quadruple cluster, which is intended to symbolize the scalability of the solution in HPC systems. But these solutions will probably not be available before the end of next year; they should debut in supercomputers. A report from spring provides some more details about the 47-chip solution.

Intel Ponte Vecchio as OCP Accelerator Module (OAM) in quadruple design (Image: Intel)