Intel’s “Xe HPG” PC gaming graphics card is slated to arrive later this year. But in the meantime, the company’s graphics chief is giving the public a sneak peek at the GPU.
On Tuesday, Intel senior vice president Raja Koduri tweeted a photo of the Xe HPG product, which is codenamed DG2. The picture shows Koduri presumably holding the Xe HPG chip between his fingers, minus the heatsink and fans. It’s not entirely clear if the GPU pictured is meant for a desktop or a laptop system. But the silicon is labeled “DG2-512,” which likely indicates the number of execution units the chip contains.
Koduri went on to say Intel has been testing the DG2 chip inside the company’s lab in Folsom, California. "Lots of game and driver optimization work ahead,” he added.
The most important tidbit from the tweet is the 512 number. This suggests the DG2 will have over five times the execution units found in Intel’s first stab at a dedicated graphics card in over 20 years: the Iris Xe “DG1," which only has 80 execution units.
The DG1 quietly launched in January, but only as an add-in card PC makers can add to pre-built desktop system. So far, we've only seen it in one upcoming PC desktop model. Early benchmarks for the DG1 also show underwhelming performance akin to an RX 550, a $79 entry-level graphics card that AMD launched in 2017.
So we’re hoping Intel can up its game with the DG2, which will have to compete against graphics cards from AMD and Nvidia. To build the GPU, Intel has tapped an outside foundry, likely TSMC, the same manufacturer behind the Radeon GPUs for AMD.