Intel Xe Graphics: An Interview with VP Lisa Pearce
anandtech.com
anandtech.com
After bailing on the embedded/microcontroller stuff and then their cell radio products, it makes me wonder if this is the flavor of the month.
Are they on the slope down to become a company more like IBM or HP which are primarily financial engineering enterprises.
Cell modem development was always something of an odd fit for Intel - it came in from an acquisition, and due to the complexities of patents and Qualcomm's domination of the modem market they only had one major customer (Apple) who used them primarily as legal leverage. Once that customer went away, it became unsustainable given the high R&D costs combined with questionable demand for discrete modems.
Intel's flirtation with low-end embedded devices makes sense on the basis that they already were using low-power Pentium-derived cores as embedded controllers, so why not offer them as standalone products. I think they clearly underestimated the costs of packaging and support for external customers, as well as the dominance ARM's Cortex-M series would establish.
So they did have some prior experience in that space, but that experience was built on the shoulders of what Digital was doing.
Of course the stumbling block there is that the Cortex-M family (rather than 8051, AVR, and PIC generations before) was already designed around good C/C++ support, and the server->embedded code reuse jump is bigger than the work involved in switching architectures. And, of course, the Cortex-M vendors already had lots of experience producing all the microcontroller variants with the particular peripherals their customers want, which is just as, if not more important than the architecture.
Does that give them modern ARM processors or just the ones of the time?
And how is even pronounced in different languages? 'He' in Greek?
If they don't support ARM servers, they are done for in some cloud/supercomputer markets. Hence they will support it.
The high-performance gaming variant (Xe-HPG) has not been released so we don't know if it's any good.
The real question, though, is what sort of performance Xe HP/HPG/HPC will bring when they're released. They don't need to significantly outperform the competition (AMD has more than demonstrated in the past that superior GPU performance alone is not enough), they just need to be close enough with a good enough software story. Cuda and Nvidia's driver stack are both reasonably nice and a pain in the ass to work with, so if Intel can (1) competently support major ML frameworks, (2) reasonably support porting from Cuda, and (3) maintain a competent OpenCL implementation that could be enough to be competitive. They'll likely eat market share from AMD first, since the AMD software stack has more rough edges.
Hopefully there's some way to get it when it's released
According to videocardbenchmark.net Intel Xe graphics are about 20% faster than the GT1030, that currently leads in the world of single slot low power GPUs
I don't care if it's 20% slower than the GT1030 if I can browse the web in firefox under KDE with default settings! Since I replace my graphics card less often than I replace my CPU, I would pay a premium for such a device.
Edit: just saw you said discrete. Oops.