Intel is expected to be at this year’s Game Developer’s Conference, and one of the presentations the company will be holding is about Xe. That’s not really surprising, but the description of the presentation is giving us some insight about what Intel is planning on doing and when Xe is actually going to hit the market.
Intel’s brand new Xe Architecture, has been teased for a while, and is scheduled for release later this year! … This talk will provide a detailed tour of the hardware architecture behind Intel’s upcoming GPUs – unveiling the structure behind its building blocks and their performance implications… This technical talk addresses game and engine developers with an interest in graphics architecture and performance, as well as future looking graphics algorithms.
Based on the description, this presentation could potentially reveal quite a bit about Xe, particularly the gaming side of the operation, and offer us details we haven’t heard yet. The description does mention that the GPUs are coming “later this year”, meaning not at GDC but rather a date some months away, but that doesn’t mean we won’t get any good info on products that are certainly coming soon like Tiger Lake, which has the same GPU as the discrete DG1.
This presentation will also likely not touch the topic of any Xe HP architecture, like Arctic Sound, Ponte Vecchio, and DG2. The GPUs Intel will discuss will almost certainly be Xe LP designs, which include DG1 and Tiger Lake’s iGPU. This is because the presentation is about gaming, and Arctic Sound and Ponte Vecchio are datacenter GPUs, not gaming GPUs. DG2 is a gaming GPU, but that is expected around 2022. This talk won’t reveal the differences between Xe HP and LP, but it could at least tell us how good Xe LP is at gaming, which is worth something.
This presentation is probably going to be pretty technical and might not even be livestreamed, but hopefully what Intel says is going to be both useful and accessible. Or, it could be a complete waste of time; we’ll just have to see how it turns out when GDC finally rolls around.
