There is no doubt that AMD and NVIDIA, despite the money made from the mining bubble, suffered a huge setback in the gaming market, as they lost the year of advantage and the mental quota they were going to have on Intel, which in a few months it will roll out its Intel Xe-HPG gaming graphics cards, both for desktops and laptops.
The Intel Xe-HPG gaming GPU comes in specification to at least compete with AMD’s RDNA 2 GPUs, although we don’t know if Intel has added units to speed up deep learning algorithms such as NVIDIA GPUs. We know these are on Intel Xe-HP, but we are not aware of their inclusion on Intel GPUs.
Intel Xe-HPG DG2, sizes and configurations
The information comes to us via the reputable German site of Hardware Igor’s Lab, which gives us information on the configurations of the Intel Xe-HPG. From here we can see that there are physically two different chips, one with a BGA type package with 2660 pins and the other also with a package with one of the 1379 pins. This indicates that although we are going to see 5 different configurations of the Intel Xe-HPG, Intel actually only created two different chips.
The one with 2660 pins which corresponds to the versions with 512 EU, 384 EU and 256 EUs will probably be the one that ends up becoming a GPU for gaming laptops on the one hand and on the other hand it will be the configuration that we would see in dedicated graphics cards. On the other hand, the 1379 pin chip will surely replace the Intel Iris Xe, for its 128 and 96 EU configurations.
A chip for each foundry?
The information we have so far tells us that Intel Xe-HPG to be manufactured at TSMC, under the 6nm node, while other information speaks of the 7nm node. If we take into account that the Intel Xe-HP will be tile / chip based, we are facing the larger monolithic GPU, that would explain why Intel would have gone for the rival foundry.
Everything indicates that if the large chip will be manufactured at TSMC, the small one could instead be manufactured in Intel’s own factories and replace the current Intel Xe-LP in laptops with the Intel Iris Xe Graphics label.
The low tech specs of the 1379 pin chip make us think it might not be launched as a gaming GPU, but the use of GDDR6 memory and improved architecture is a jump in quality from the current Iris Xe.
