12-28-2019, 09:26 AM
https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/30383...d-graphics
Quote:Ever since Intel announced Xe, its next-generation graphics processor, there’s been speculation and discussion about what kind of GPUs the company would bring to market. Ice Lake’s new GPU is an important step along this path, with its substantial performance uplift and Gen 11 graphics. There have been rumors that Intel’s next-generation 10nm CPU, codenamed Tiger Lake, will have 96 EUs — and a new bit of information suggests at least one model of Intel’s upcoming dGPU will feature that many EUs as well.
Hot Hardware spotted this data via Twitter user Komachi. Komachi found the following document on the European Economic Community (EEC) website:
The “96EU” remark implies that this is a Tiger Lake-style configuration, while the “Alpha” points to the hardware still being very early in development. I’m not going to try to speculate too much on how much performance moving from 64 to 96 EUs will get Intel, though we’d expect that kind of shift to boost performance by 1.5x on paper, assuming no other significant bottlenecks in the design prevent scaling out. Since we’d be dealing with a standalone card, we can probably assume clocks equal-to or higher than an Ice Lake laptop part. With 8 threads per EU, we’d consider this a 768-core configuration (though AMD, NV, and Intel GPUs all perform a different amount of work per-core, so GPUs can’t be compared directly on core count).
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The takeaway is this: Even if Intel launches a low-end card with a similar configuration to its iGPU, overall dGPU performance is very likely to be higher — but we can’t really judge by how much. There’s no way to perform this kind of comparison with an Nvidia card, and we have older AMD results that point in one direction and newer results that imply a smaller gap for some configurations. The RX 550 is almost never slower than the 3400G, despite running at lower clocks. If Intel’s goal is to challenge from the low and midrange markets first before it makes a play for the high-end, bringing in a lower-tier part first makes sense. Intel may be looking for a chip that can let it challenge Nvidia’s lower-end parts in laptops and the occasional desktop more than it wants to bring a huge-die product to market for gamers. Every dollar of OEM laptop spend dedicated to a non-Intel GPU is a dollar of profit that Intel isn’t capturing. Intel’s CEO, Bob Swan, has openly stated that he intends to focus on being a company with 30 percent market share in a huge range of markets rather than laser-focusing on 90 percent market share in the CPU space. Taking more space in critical consumer markets is key to doing that.