Given Intel's reputation stable Linux drivers, I'm excited for their discrete desktop GPUs.
Intel Xe will likely be very poorly received because they'll be compared to AMD and Nvidia's best offerings and "Intel is failing at everything" is the big story now. But AMD and Nvidia are treating the low end GPU market as some sort of a backwater, and there's a proper niche for people who just want a reliable graphics card with modern video outputs and modern video codecs. If it can run desktop 3D effects smoothly on multiple high resolution screens - like a better or less expensive GT1030 and RX550 - you can be golden. Not everything GPU is about gaming or high end compute.
[1]: Okay, AMD's Linux drivers are also really good, but they can still have more hairy edge cases and lack of development than Intel's.
seems like it would make more sense as an absolute bottom-of-the-barrel desktop part. maybe you have some old desktop that you want to turn into an HTPC, but it doesn't have the right ports or the ability to decode high bitrate video in realtime. plop one of these guys in for (ideally) $xx and you're good to go. of course, this would be the opposite of the high-margin stuff intel likes to make.
Any Sandy Bridge to 1st gen Skylake desktop does not have these connections or codecs and could often really benefit from a decent $50-$80 add on GPU. Desktop Sandy Bridge can still make for a very decent computer if you can keep upgrade costs in check. An Intel Xe would also be a decent upgrade if you now already depend on some crappy older Nvidia or AMD GPU.
[1]: Besides your basic h264/hevc/vp9 decoding, it seems Intel Xe has AV1 hardware video decoding, which you can otherwise only get in the very expensive/hard to get/power hungry AMD and Nvidia discrete GPUs (to be) released this month.
If you want a <=75 watt GPU, which happens to be the limit for the PCIe slot without an external power connector, you have very limited options. For nVidia, the 1650 is the only modern part that will fit the bill. For AMD, you have to reach back to the RX 500 series, but good luck finding one. They're extremely uncommon even among the lower-end 500 series, as many of them require an external connector anyways.
AMD do have lower-powered "workstation" offerings, but they're so expensive that it's hard to imagine putting one in a workstation voluntarily. They're also extremely poor performers, to the extent that you might not really see much of a benefit over a Vega iGPU.
The Xe Max is only 25W TDP, which is very attractive if you're hoping to build a passively cooled Linux machine with a low-wattage power supply.
But goodness are they pretty.
The old ones don't support HDMI 2.0 so can only do 30Hz.
Are they though? The GPU embedded in my ryzen 4900 seems to be just as good, if not better than this xe. The desktop version I would expect to show even better.
The use case is for people who want HEDT CPUs but don't need high-end GPU power. Getting a modern low-power GPU allows you to still support modern codecs, modern display adapters, and high resolution displays.
As it stands, there is no GPU that:
- consumes 75W or less of power (i.e. running only on PCIe power)
- has a modern architecture (with the latest codecs, display adapters, good perf-per-watt, etc.)
- has solid support from open source drivers.
Understandably, it's a niche use case. But AMD hasn't launched a new GPU in that range for almost 4 years.
The desktop application is going to be OEM only and there's no indication at this point that it'll even be used to power external monitors vs. just a GPU offload for AI/ML workloads.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16211/intels-dg1-gpu-coming-t...
Yes, I know. This particular thread of conversation was started by my comment about my excitement for what this means when the desktop counterpart is released.
With US retailers, you're limited to zen+, 4-core chips when zen3 cpus (with no gpu) are arriving shortly. Just because I don't want a high power GPU doesn't mean I want a CPU that old and limited.
If they miss the timeline to get laptop chips out the door for back to school season, Dell, HP, Asus, etc will just go with Intel as the vat majority of laptop sales happen in one short period of the year.
TSMC 7nm production is at capacity, Apple has the bulk of the wafers and AMD has to share the remainder with other customers on that 7nm process. Nvidia literally got no wafers allocated by TSMC, hence why they have been forced to use Samsung's half baked 8nm process that performs much worse.
Some people here value "open source" drivers over "working drivers". I value "working drivers" over "open source" drivers over "proprietary" drivers.
An open source driver that does not work, is worth zero to me.
If it were true that "open source" means somebody can go and fix the driver, then somebody could have added ROCm support for the 5700 XT a long time ago. The fact that this has not happen, to me at least, means that open source is not as valuable as people seem to try to make it be here.
Sure it is better than closed source, but if your driver doesn't work, and AMD doesn't want to fix it, it definitely does not mean that anybody will fix it within the lifetime of the card. This card will be surpassed by the 6000 series next week, no chance I'm going to buy one of those.
For compute, you need Polaris op Vega, the documentation is very clear about chips supported.
It wasn't spelled out, but I think the implied rationale was that doing so would just be used against them by competitors' marketing in a bullet-point feature comparison. And maybe a bit of "you don't care if it's hardware, you care if it's fast", which isn't unreasonable.
That is not entirely accurate though.
From a total GPU market presumptive, Low End / Low Power equals integrated GPU. And both AMD and Nvidia simply cant compete with that. The market of a Low End GPU is tiny and unprofitable. When most consumers or customers are happy with their Intel iGPU.
I dont blame them for lack of SKUs in this segment. And AMD is competing with their own APU as well.
People looking for Linux laptops certainly do. I've tried the AMD route twice the last ten years and I've been disappointed by crappy driver support and battery life in both cases.
To justify it existence, a discrete GPU need to be better than that.
I have to guess that's because the low end GPU market is not very profitable.
I did. My laptop has i3-6157u CPU, I chose it due to the Intel Iris GPU there.
If I would be looking for a new one today, for similar reasons I would have picked an AMD APU.
I'd like to counter this. Intel's driver quality is going down for a year or so. My old EliteBook 850G2 is running with Intel Graphics but, it started to show some flickering and corruptions for no reason. Nobody bothered to fix it yet.
Intel's e1000e drivers started to behave awry on some older cards and, Intel didn't fix it. On the contrary, they continued to pile patches over this buggy driver. Kernel guys and Debian developers had to revert some patches back to stabilize the driver again. It still loses connectivity sometimes.
By older cards, I mean some of them are barely two years old.
IF, a big IF, Intel gets its thing together and restores the quality, it's great. Otherwise, I don't put them on a pedestal for driver quality.
On the Windows side, I have an Intel wireless card which is officially supported by current drivers but, the new drivers bork the card after standby and system has to be powered off to restore card connectivity. The computer is a HP Spectre X2 convertible and, only older, out of the box Windows drivers (which are stock Intel drivers) can utilize the card correctly.
It'd need to cover the corner cases well. Multimonitor setups. High res. Etc.