Raja Koduri Possibly Hints at June 2020 Intel Xe Graphics Card Release

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By Arne Verheyde
last updated

In a conspicuous Twitter post on Friday, Intel’s chief architect Raja Koduri seemingly hinted at a June 2020 announcement or release of the company’s forthcoming Intel Xe Graphics cards.

It is common knowledge by now among hardware enthusiasts that Intel will enter the discrete graphics market, as the company has been public about ever since taking Raja Koduri on board. In 2018, the company committed to a 2020 release schedule for the first of those Xe graphics card(s), which eventually will span from entry-level mobile all the way up to the data center, including gaming GPUs, and even exascale supercomputers with a Xe-based GPGPU that will serve as the launch vehicle for Intel's 7nm process.


As a refresher, Xe is another name for the Gen 12 graphics architecture, which will come in two micro-architecture variants, one optimized for consumers and one optimized for the data center.

(Image credit: Intel)

However, so far Intel has not been willing to provide any more specific guidance beyond "first availability by end of 2020," although some rumors have placed the Xe-powered Tiger Lake CPUs in the first half of 2020. With the latest tweet from Raja Koduri, this might have changed.

The picture shows the backside of a Tesla Model S, whose custom license plate unambiguously reads ‘THINKXE.’ ("Think Xe.") Given Intel’s previous disclosures, also seeing ‘2020’ on the plate does not come as a surprise, and indeed gets one to think.

Most conspicuous is the June month on license plate. The June 2020 date seems too specific to be a coincidence. Intel might have an announcement, and perhaps even a release, planned for Computex in June 2020.

Meanwhile, another Twitter post on Thursday, from an unverified source, suggested that Lakefield-R will be another product based on Xe (based on some source code). The tweeter also says that the driver requirements for Lakefield-R and Ryefield are the same.

Arne Verheyde
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28 Comments Comment from the forums
  • hannibal
    Good! Next year seems to be really interesting in GPU department. Three players now!

    CPU part is not so interesting. AMD make improvements... Intel is still struggling. Lets see if AMD can buy enough production capacity... Most likely not, so Intel will sell well because there will not be enough AMD CPUs available to all those who wants to have them. But those AMD improvements seems promising, so demand can be huge compared to production!
    Reply
  • nofanneeded
    hannibal said:
    Good! Next year seems to be really interesting in GPU department. Three players now!

    CPU part is not so interesting. AMD make improvements... Intel is still struggling. Lets see if AMD can buy enough production capacity... Most likely not, so Intel will sell well because there will not be enough AMD CPUs available to all those who wants to have them. But those AMD improvements seems promising, so demand can be huge compared to production!

    Will never be three players . Intel will focus on the onboard graphics , I doubt that they can compete in Graphics cards at all . they need many generation to reach . not from the first Gen for sure.
    Reply
  • kinggremlin
    nofanneeded said:
    Will never be three players . Intel will focus on the onboard graphics , I doubt that they can compete in Graphics cards at all . they need many generation to reach . not from the first Gen for sure.

    They're not likely to be competing with the xx80Ti's of the world out of the gate, but they should be capable of a solid midrange and lower cards which is where the majority of consumers are. From there it's a question of how will they price it. If they do what AMD is doing, pricing just slightly below Nvidia with a worse feature set, then there's no benefit of a third entrant in the field. If they price well below putting pricing pressure on Nvidia and AMD, then the consumer benefits.
    Reply
  • hannibal
    It remains to be seing. Intel cpu Are not terriby well priced, but Intel ssd Are reasonable good. Intel 660 is one of the most popular ssd around because of price, so anything is possible in that price gategory. Where do They aim for?
    Are They only interested in workstation/corporate level customers. Then Intel GPUs can be expensive and They Ride with their Name. If They Are interested in customer markets, They have to cut under Nvidia and amd, because their driver department does not have stellar reputation. Really hard to say yet.
    Reply
  • kenjitamura
    I hope to see Intel change the GPGPU landscape so that CUDA is no longer the de facto requirement to use many graphics accelerated programs. The only reason I'm using an Nvidia card really is that it lets me run certain upscaling programs that use deep convolutional neural networking algorithms and require CUDA.
    Reply
  • ryzengamer
    Intel have not done any magic in the history and will not do in the future. Nobody has had a successful first GPU card launch. First Intel GPU cards and drivers will be buggy as hell.

    https://bugzilla.freedesktop.org/buglist.cgi?chfield=%5BBug%20creation%5D&chfieldfrom=7dintel-gfx-bugs
    intel-gfx-bugs
    ...
    Reply
  • kinggremlin
    ryzengamer said:
    Intel have not done any magic in the history and will not do in the future. Nobody has had a successful first GPU card launch. First Intel GPU cards and drivers will be buggy as hell.

    https://bugzilla.freedesktop.org/buglist.cgi?chfield=&chfieldfrom=7dintel-gfx-bugs
    intel-gfx-bugs
    ...

    Nvidia popularized the term GPU with the release of the Geforce 256 in 1999 being advertised as the first GPU. I'm not aware of any company entering the desktop graphics market after 1999. So who are these companies with the failed GPU launches you allude to? The last new entrant into the desktop graphics market pre-GPU was 3dfx. I don't think anyone would argue they nailed their first release the Voodoo1. So your point isn't accurate there either. Intel is not new to the graphics world, they have been producing graphics chips for over 2 decades, so I would not expect their drivers to be any less stable than AMD's or Nvidia's. And let's be honest, being as stable as AMD's launch day drivers is not really setting a very high standard.
    Reply
  • Olle P
    nofanneeded said:
    ... Intel will focus on the onboard graphics, ...
    You're right there! Their plan is to make XPUs that will be found in everything, from "smart" toasters to massive servers...

    wADBkjr63oU
    Reply
  • Finstar
    kinggremlin said:
    They're not likely to be competing with the xx80Ti's of the world out of the gate, but they should be capable of a solid midrange and lower cards which is where the majority of consumers are. From there it's a question of how will they price it. If they do what AMD is doing, pricing just slightly below Nvidia with a worse feature set, then there's no benefit of a third entrant in the field. If they price well below putting pricing pressure on Nvidia and AMD, then the consumer benefits.
    Eh, not really. Intel needs to match the performance of Turing and RDNA to be competitive, and i mean the architectures.
    Sure, Intel can make lowend and midrange cards, but they're not worth it if they're on a massive die with huge power draw and heat output.
    If Intel can make competitive midrange and lowend gpus then there's no reason why they couldn't upscale them to high end.
    Reply
  • Soaptrail
    Nice shade the writer is throwing at Intel:

    Intel's response to AMD's Ryzen onslaught has typically been sluggish, largely because the company hasn't resorted to cutting prices on existing models. Instead, the company has slowly added more cores to its processor families with the release of new models, with those increased core counts equating to lower per-core pricing.
    Reply