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Who else is excited about Intel's Xe?

Thu Jan 31, 2019 11:45 am

It may not be a miracle of silicon out of the gate, but the idea of three capable GPU vendors all vying for consumer dollars has me kind of excited. I'm looking forward to seeing what they offer, how capable it is for OpenCL compute, and to day one Linux support. What about the rest of you?
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Re: Who else is excited about Intel's Xe?

Thu Jan 31, 2019 12:17 pm

It's a little too undefined to get me excited yet. I get excited about specific purchasable products. Until they have a specific card with specific capabilities and a launch date, it's vapourware.

Will they produce credible competition to AMD and NVidia? No clue. If they do, great, but way too early to get goose bumps over it.
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Re: Who else is excited about Intel's Xe?

Thu Jan 31, 2019 12:29 pm

I assume most of us remember how well Larrabee worked out...
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Re: Who else is excited about Intel's Xe?

Thu Jan 31, 2019 12:49 pm

While I'm of course contractually obligated to be excited, I would seriously expect no miracles from at least the first generation of Intel dGPUs.

First of all, even though they have Raj, the Artic Sound GPUs aren't some made-from-scratch new GPU. Based on info from last month's architecture day, the first GPUs will be an upscaled version of the Ice Lake graphics cores with a few tweaks thrown in (look for Gen 11.5 nomenclature). That's probably good enough to make a respectable GPU but don't expect crazy ray tracing or some other wacky technology that's radically different from what you expect in a GPU.

Second of all, while the FUD about Intel's 10nm process being broken is far too strong, don't expect Intel to churn out massive GPU silicon in 2020 since there are other departments that will be gobbling it up. That means you shouldn't expect some 500 mm2 consumer GPU to drop anytime soon. The most interesting (and totally unconfirmed) rumor I've heard is that Intel may scale by using EMIB to connect smaller GPU tiles together. A fascinating idea that bizarrely enough isn't used in GPUs already even though we've been chipletted to death in CPUs.

Here's what I would call a successful outcome for Intel: The highest end Xe parts are pretty competitive with the higher end of "mainstream" 2020 GPUs while having reasonable prices. Things like Navi (which slots in below the Radeon VII) or a mid-range Nvidia card, but not the gamer-extreme cards where Intel probably won't compete.
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Re: Who else is excited about Intel's Xe?

Thu Jan 31, 2019 1:36 pm

just brew it! wrote:
I assume most of us remember how well Larrabee worked out...

And some of us are old enough to remember how the i860 worked out before that (though arguably it had more success as a "GPU" than as a general purpose CPU, it still wasn't great). Intel's track record of doing anything non-x86 is rather...underwhelming.

Assuming they are just pulling the IGP out of their processors and making it moar (in terms of functional units), it will be interesting to see how it performs when given its own memory without any contention with the CPU. I suppose they could add some on-chip edram or go with a multiple chiplet approach to surprise people, but at this point I see it more as a way for them to eat up idle fab capacity (especially when/if they ever get the CPUs transitioned to a genuinely shrunk node).

If they can produce something performance-competitive at around the $200 price point without losing money, and if their driver guys don't screw things up and undercut the hardware, they should have a success. At the very least, they could win over some of the OEMs who are currently sourcing mid-range products from the red and green teams.

The other thing I'm curious about is whether (or how much) Intel is targeting mobile with this part. They certainly have an opportunity to win over the ODMs who are currently throwing yet-another-rebranded MX-whatever into "gaming laptops."
 
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Re: Who else is excited about Intel's Xe?

Thu Jan 31, 2019 2:06 pm

As I understand it, Arctic Sound was developed initially as an edge computing device. Which means stuff like video streaming cards for servers. I imagine that once they had started designing what was effectively a discreet gpu they figured they could make some extra money selling it into the dgpu market. Perhaps that's part of why they hired Raj. They needed more business expertise in the dgpu market.

I'd hazard a guess that their first outing will be more low end. Like in the $100 - $150 market. Something that might be considered in the htpc market considering it's original design considerations. I'm really mostly curious if they're committed to this enough to really step up their game and do more on the driver front and start working with game devs more to really get in and compete or are they just trying to find an alternate market to scoop up some extra sales for cards aimed primarily at other markets? I think it would be in their interest to put some pressure on nvidia in that space if they can. I guess time will tell.
 
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Re: Who else is excited about Intel's Xe?

Thu Jan 31, 2019 2:38 pm

just brew it! wrote:
I assume most of us remember how well Larrabee worked out...


This time, Intel actually has graphics gurus (ie: ATI's Raja) who can properly make a GPU. And maybe Intel's executives will give more leeway to Graphics-specialists to actually make a proper GPU this time.

Then again: Intel always had some people who understood graphics programming in their organization. Their iGPU is a bit strange (shared memory is used across L3 cahce?? Not L1?? Uhhh....), but its clearly a parallel SIMD / GPGPU design. And IPSC was clearly written by a graphics guru (Mike Pharr, so I've been told). Intel needs to realize that GPGPU / SIMD programming is a completely different paradigm with its own history and culture.
Last edited by dragontamer5788 on Thu Jan 31, 2019 3:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.
 
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Re: Who else is excited about Intel's Xe?

Thu Jan 31, 2019 3:05 pm

just brew it! wrote:
I assume most of us remember how well Larrabee worked out...


We thought it was great!
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Re: Who else is excited about Intel's Xe?

Thu Jan 31, 2019 3:25 pm

Do we know yet if it's going to be a consumer product? It's hard for me to get excited about something when I don't know anything about it. :P
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Re: Who else is excited about Intel's Xe?

Thu Jan 31, 2019 6:05 pm

Intel IGP drivers have slowly changed from "downright useless" to "passable" over the last 18 months or so.
Game compatibility on Intel IGPs have changed from "might run" to "will probably run" in the last 18 months or so.

I'm not expecting miracles, but if Intel could scale up their IGPs without failing at performance/efficiency/drivers by a factor of 4 or more, I think they stand a good chance of stealing a lot of market share. Kaby/Coffee's UHD 630 IGP is passable for 720p30 at lowest settings in most games and they do that without dedicated GDDR and only 192 shaders. A Kaby/Coffee-based 768 or 1024 shader equivalent ought to hit 1080p60 at medium details and honestly that puts them in the running because the vast majority of people aren't buying anything faster than a GTX1060/RX570 right now.
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Re: Who else is excited about Intel's Xe?

Thu Jan 31, 2019 6:25 pm

Redocbew wrote:
Do we know yet if it's going to be a consumer product? It's hard for me to get excited about something when I don't know anything about it. :P

Yeah, they are planning on HPC/workstation/server stuff and consumer stuff.

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https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/in ... 932-3.html
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Re: Who else is excited about Intel's Xe?

Thu Jan 31, 2019 6:30 pm

Redocbew wrote:
Do we know yet if it's going to be a consumer product? It's hard for me to get excited about something when I don't know anything about it. :P


Really.. I find that I'm most excited about stuff BEFORE I know what it is! After those pesky things called "facts" and "reality" interfere I usually go Krogoth.
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Re: Who else is excited about Intel's Xe?

Thu Jan 31, 2019 6:33 pm

DancinJack wrote:
Redocbew wrote:
Do we know yet if it's going to be a consumer product? It's hard for me to get excited about something when I don't know anything about it. :P

Yeah, they are planning on HPC/workstation/server stuff and consumer stuff.

I know they have to cover compute and graphics, but it sure would be nice to see a GPU sold that was build *purely* for rasterization performance. It's been a while in the consumer space since we've had that.
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Re: Who else is excited about Intel's Xe?

Thu Jan 31, 2019 6:58 pm

DancinJack wrote:


... and I still don't know anything about it. :P

I guess the choices are that they make something that's specific to compute/HPC and jump on the machine learning bandwagon, or they try to cover all the bases by including graphics also. If one powerpoint slide is anything to go by, then it looks like they'll try to be covering all the bases. Hopefully it doesn't suck, but I'm not expecting it to affect pricing all that much either way. If it doesn't suck, then I doubt the average selling price of a GPU is going to change much. I could be wrong, but I don't see Intel building for a budget price point just to be competitive, and if it does suck then nobody cares.
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Re: Who else is excited about Intel's Xe?

Thu Jan 31, 2019 7:07 pm

chuckula wrote:
Really.. I find that I'm most excited about stuff BEFORE I know what it is! After those pesky things called "facts" and "reality" interfere I usually go Krogoth.

This. I'm totally stoked over it right now, but I recognize that's going to change once we have something more than vaporware.
 
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Re: Who else is excited about Intel's Xe?

Fri Jul 12, 2019 7:38 am

https://www.vortez.net/news_story/intel ... d_gpu.html
Renderings, puportedly of Intel Xe graphics cards.
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Re: Who else is excited about Intel's Xe?

Fri Jul 12, 2019 8:14 pm

JustAnEngineer wrote:
https://www.vortez.net/news_story/intel_chinas_official_weibo_released_more_details_on_intel_xe_based_gpu.html
Renderings, puportedly of Intel Xe graphics cards.


Those renders have nice ray tracin--- wait RAY TRACING!!!!? WHO LET THOSE IDIOTS USE THE NGREEDIA CARDS TO RENDER THE FAKED-UP MODELS OF OUR PRODUCTS!
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Re: Who else is excited about Intel's Xe?

Wed Jul 17, 2019 1:57 am

I’ve seen this thread in the Unread Posts for a while now, but I just figured it was related to some obscure server tech, and never bothered to click. Wasn’t until I remembered they were planning discrete cards, and found the name in a google search.

Xe.

I think Intel could have chosen any word, phrase, or combination of letters at random, and the name would have been of more interest to me (their target demographic). Out of near-infinite choices, they literally chose the worst one available. I’m not sure how that’s possible. They’d do better having a computer algorithm just pick randomized gibberish.

The entire marketing division needs to go. Just empty it completely. Having nothing is better.
 
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Re: Who else is excited about Intel's Xe?

Wed Jul 17, 2019 2:43 am

chuckula wrote:
WHO LET THOSE IDIOTS USE THE NGREEDIA CARDS TO RENDER THE FAKED-UP MODELS OF OUR PRODUCTS!


It was the Knights who say Xe!
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Re: Who else is excited about Intel's Xe?

Wed Jul 17, 2019 3:04 am

The Egg wrote:
I’ve seen this thread in the Unread Posts for a while now, but I just figured it was related to some obscure server tech, and never bothered to click. Wasn’t until I remembered they were planning discrete cards, and found the name in a google search.

Xe.

I think Intel could have chosen any word, phrase, or combination of letters at random, and the name would have been of more interest to me (their target demographic). Out of near-infinite choices, they literally chose the worst one available. I’m not sure how that’s possible. They’d do better having a computer algorithm just pick randomized gibberish.

The entire marketing division needs to go. Just empty it completely. Having nothing is better.


But it's the chemical symbol for Xenon! Which clearly means a great deal to gamers, and is in no way easy to confuse with their Xeon CPUs! Or with the Xenon CPU in the XBox 360!
 
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Re: Who else is excited about Intel's Xe?

Tue Oct 08, 2019 11:50 am

Here's the latest teaser from Intel's Raja Koduri:
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel ... 40562.html
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Re: Who else is excited about Intel's Xe?

Tue Oct 08, 2019 1:31 pm

Hmm, if Intel is fully into SIMD-compute, it'd be nice to have a competitor.

AMD's ROCm is okay, but its software leaves much to be desired. AMD's hardware is great, it just is locked behind a weak software. Fortunately AMD has good relationships with Linux, but they still need a lot of work to get the ROCm environment competitive.

NVidia is expensive but it does work.

Intel doesn't need to be as fast as AMD or NVidia, they just need to have as good of a software environment as NVidia. PCIe slots are just fundamentally a more cohesive / faster technology than 10 Gbps ethernet or 40 Gbps Infiniband. So having a competitive PCIe coprocessor (hopefully like Xeon Phi, except actually good) would go a long way.
 
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Re: Who else is excited about Intel's Xe?

Tue Oct 08, 2019 3:34 pm

Xe = Vega done right minus the glue
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Re: Who else is excited about Intel's Xe?

Wed Oct 09, 2019 5:19 pm

Krogoth wrote:
Xe = Vega done right minus the glue

Your ability to extrapolate from incomplete information is astounding. :)

The consumer Xe is likely to have most of the compute stripped out (unless Intel is in a pinch getting silicon ready for Aurora, then perhaps it'll be a massive fat chip). It would definitely be good for them to not launch the series with a monstrously compute-heavy chip.
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Re: Who else is excited about Intel's Xe?

Thu Oct 10, 2019 6:06 am

Waco wrote:
It would definitely be good for them to not launch the series with a monstrously compute-heavy chip.


... iiiffff they're going after the consumer / gamer market instead of the data center market.
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Re: Who else is excited about Intel's Xe?

Thu Oct 10, 2019 2:05 pm

K-L-Waster wrote:
Waco wrote:
It would definitely be good for them to not launch the series with a monstrously compute-heavy chip.


... iiiffff they're going after the consumer / gamer market instead of the data center market.

They're absolutely going after the data center market with at least one model of the Xe. I'm just hoping they don't make the mistake of making that the primary consumer version, because it'll be hotter, slower, and more expensive than it needs to be for gaming.
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Re: Who else is excited about Intel's Xe?

Fri Oct 11, 2019 7:00 am

Waco wrote:
I'm just hoping they don't make the mistake of making that the primary consumer version, because it'll be hotter, slower, and more expensive than it needs to be for gaming.


But that's assuming they care.

I could easily see Intel treating the gaming market as an after thought -- Xe could turn into Intel's answer to the Radeon VII.
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Re: Who else is excited about Intel's Xe?

Fri Oct 11, 2019 10:57 am

Intel is only going after datacenter and APUs on the mainstream-side. I would be genuinely be surprised if they made a serious attempt at making a discrete gaming SKU that isn't meant to promote a new standard (FYI, i740 was designed to promote adoption of AGP).
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Re: Who else is excited about Intel's Xe?

Fri Oct 11, 2019 11:51 am

They already stated they're releasing discrete GPUs. It was literally the first announcement they made about the Xe publicly.
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Re: Who else is excited about Intel's Xe?

Fri Oct 25, 2019 11:25 am

https://www.techradar.com/news/intel-will-take-on-nvidia-and-amd-graphics-cards-by-mid-2020-but-gamers-could-be-disappointed

The rumors of a mid-2020 launch for the Intel Xe graphics card come from industry sources, according to DigiTimes. Apparently, the sources have said that: “Instead of purely targeting the gaming market, Intel is set to combine the new GPUs with its CPUs to create a competitive platform in a bid to pursuit business opportunities from datacenter, AI and machine learning applications.”

That means that Intel’s upcoming graphics card might not be aimed at gamers. The focus on AI and machine learning applications in particular could worry Nvidia, which has been investing heavily in those areas.
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