Intel Xe HP NEO Graphics Spotted on GeekBench

The competition to make the best graphics cards and rank at the top of our GPU benchmarks has traditionally been a fight between Nvidia and AMD. Intel still hopes to shake things up next year with its dedicated Xe Graphics cards, but there are lots of unknowns. In the meantime, Twitter user APISAK, tweeted a new Geekbench score showcasing the potential performance of the yet unreleased Intel Xe HP NEO graphics chip featuring 512 EUs.

Intel's Xe HP will be Intel's next generation of datacenter GPUs targeting raw compute performance, and competing directly with the likes of Nvidia's A100 datacenter GPUs. One big feature of the Xe HP GPUs includes multi-GPU capabilities called tiling, with a max of four tiles per chip. This is similar to AMD's CCX on its Ryzen based platforms. Each tile represents a GPU, and Intel will make one, two and four tile solutions for the data center, all connected via a high speed interconnect called EMIB (Embedded Multi-die Interconnect Bridge). The Xe GPUs will also include tensor cores for AI intensive applications and HBM2e memory.

In the Geekbench score, the Xe HP NEO only hits 25475 points in the OpenCL test, which compared to a mid-range card like an RTX 2060 (which scores 70681) is around 2.5x slower in performance. However, we need to liberally sprinkle about the caveats, applying salt as needed.

This is just Intel's single tile Xe HP chip, and it's operating at 1.15GHz compared to 1.3Ghz in Intel's Architecture Day benchmarks. This would also be an early result, and there's still plenty of development going into the Xe architecture and its drivers, so there's still a lot of time for optimization. What's more, we ran the Geekbench 5 compute test on an Asus laptop with a Core i7-1167G7 that features a 96 EU Xe Graphics solution, and it scored 15212.

In short, synthetic benchmarks like Geekbench are often poor representations of real-world performance, and the 512 EU result is particularly low. Consider it more as potential proof that Xe HP is in the wild rather than any real indication of performance. Based on specs alone, Xe HP should score closer to 75,000 (five times the Xe LP result), and that clearly isn't happening right now.