The duopoly between AMD and NVIDIA in dedicated PC graphics cards will soon be counted with Intel’s entry into this market and this time not with a mid-range approach, but Intel intends to enter. all the spaces head on through its Intel Xe GPU, where the XE-HPG Gaming GPU stands out from the rest.
Intel Xe-HPG also comes on laptops
Intel plans to completely phase out the use of its current Xe DG1, used as a dedicated graphics in the Tiger Lake, when they launch their Tiger Lake-H for laptops. His idea is to jointly sell the processor and the new Intel Xe Iris, but this time based on the second-generation architecture, Xe DG2, which he will call the most secure Xe-HPG.
Intel does not intend to release just one version of its Intel Xe-HPG, but five different versions, as can be seen in the table above. We have this information thanks to Igor’s Lab. The idea of Intel to sell its CPUs and GPUs together to assemblers who want to assemble gaming laptops should not surprise us at all, Intel with this launches a torpedo at the NVIDIA waterline, but above all it joins the same game from AMD, which by its own interests offers laptop manufacturers the combination of its processors and GPUs, albeit with a much smaller market share than NVIDIA.
We cannot forget that one of the most important markets for NVIDIA is in laptop GPUs, where thanks to the fact that their RTX 20 and RTX 30 Mobile have been unmatched by AMD, they dominate this market. As you can see from the image that Igor’s Lab leaked, Intel created a common PCB to communicate the Intel Xe-HPG for laptops with Tiger Lake.
In the picture you can see not only the socket for the CPU, but also for an Intel Xe-HPG GPU with a configuration of 128 or 64 bit GDDR6, with which it would compete face to face with the impending RX 5500 of AMD and NVIDIA RTX 3050. Which, at least in NVIDIA’s case, will debut on laptops first.
Intel Xe-HPG Mobile specifications disclosed
The other thing that we have been able to know are the configurations of the different versions of Intel Xe-HPG, which you can see in the following table:
| SKU 1 | SKU 2 | |
|---|---|---|
| Encapsulated | BGA2660 | BGA2660 |
| VRAM type | GDDR6 | GDDR6 |
| Gbit / s VRAM | 16 | 16 |
| Ancho-bit bus VRAM | 256 | 192 |
| VRAM capability | 16 GB | 12 GB |
| Smart cache | 16 MB | 12 MB |
| Graphics execution units (EU) | 512 (4096 ALU) | 384 (3072 ALU) |
| Base speed (portable) | 1.1 GHz | 600 MHz |
| Turbo speed (portable) | 1.8 GHz | 1.8 GHz |
| TDP (Laptop and GPU only) | 100 W | 100 W |
This information has been filtered by Igor`s Lab, from which we can draw a series of implicit conclusions, like that on a laptop, the three most powerful versions of the Intel Xe-HPG Mobile can reach 100W TDP each for laptops, although it must be taken into account that each manufacturer will adjust the clock speed and voltage of the GPU according to the thermal and power capacities of their design. If you think the consumption is very high, just remember that some models of the RTX 3080 Mobile, equivalent to a desktop RTX 3070, can easily exceed 100W in terms of TDP.
We’re surprised we don’t have any information on desktop models, which makes us think that Intel would consider launching a line of gaming laptops with the newer GPUs first before launching in the form of desktop graphics cards, a move that makes all the sense in the world from a strategic point of view, given that AMD’s main advantage currently in laptops isn’t the power of its Zen 3 cores, but its combination with its integrated GPUS.
