It turns out Intel’s Graphics Division isn’t completely dead yet. The company is supposedly working on an Xe microarchitecture for gamers, codenamed Xe-HPG (High-Perf Gaming) with support for hardware-level ray-tracing.
There’s no word on the specifications of these Xe graphics cards, but sources claim that they will be based on the GDDR6 memory standard. Furthermore, these parts will be fabbed by a third-party foundry (TSMC), with a targeted launch in 2021.
As both AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards will have native support for ray-tracing by that time, Intel has no choice but to integrate the feature as well. Videocardz reports that the Xe-HPG GPUs are presently being evaluated at Intel’s labs.
There’s also a line of Data Center GPUs in the pipeline, codenamed XeHP. The HP lineup will feature three primary variants with 1, 2, and 4 tiles, respectively. It’s internally dubbed as “XeHP HD Graphics Neo”.
Each tile will include 512EUs, bringing the total shader count of the 4-tile chip to 2,048 EUs with the 2-tile featuring 1,024 EUs
| Intel Xe-HP | Arctic Sound | Xe-HP 2-tile | Xe-HP 1-tile |
|---|---|---|---|
| GPU | 10nm Xe-HP (4-tile) | 10nm Xe-HP (2-tile) | 10nm Xe-HP (1-tile) |
| Execution Units | 2048 | 1024 | 512 |
| FP32 Performance | 42.3 TFLOPs | 21.2 TFLOPs | 10.6 TFLOPs |
