Intel Xe DG2 will be the next graphics card that the chip giant will put on the market and the first that we will be able to buy since DG1 is not intended for the retail segment but will only be sold to the system integrators for installation in new equipment. Will it be a real alternative to the NVIDIA and AMD portfolios? Will it be able to occupy a prominent place among the fastest graphics cards on the market?
The worldwide graphics segment will reach revenues of $200 billion by 2027, according to some analysts’ forecasts. Gaming and its hyper-realistic graphics; 4K and 8K displays; Whatever comes from AV/VR; The popularity of the Internet of Things (IoT); Artificial intelligence; Machine learning and, of course, cryptocurrency mining, will be the main fields to reach a spectacular business figure.
Intel Xe DG2
Intel is the world’s leading manufacturer of graphics chips thanks to the integrated chips included in its processors, but it cannot compete in terms of performance with the big players in the industry: NVIDIA and AMD. At the beginning of the last decade, Intel embarked on an ambitious strategy to re-enter the dedicated graphics segment, from which it had been excluded for twenty years.
Intel’s new Core and Visual Computing Group took shape under the leadership of Raja Koduri (former head of AMD’s Radeon Technologies group) and other talented engineers. Recently, Tom Petersen, former CTO of NVIDIA Marketing, joined the group. Although we had already seen some of his work on recent integrated GPUs, earlier this year Intel kicked off its commercial activity with the launch of the DG1. It was a start, although this GPU is limited in performance and availability.
Intel Xe DG2 will be much more interesting, but can it compete? Although its final specifications are not known, Raja Koduri has published a clue that can put us in the picture.
From 2012 to 2021 – same Intel Folsom lab, many of the same engineers with more grey hair , I was at Apple back then, getting hands on with pre-production crystalwell, 9 years later playing with a GPU that’s >20x faster! pic.twitter.com/RgmRJuhOXw
— Raja Koduri (@RajaXg) March 12, 2021
The image shows the chief GPU architect at Intel working in a lab with the Intel Iris Pro 5200. It was 2012 and according to the engineer, nine years later the graphics card they are working on (Intel Xe DG2) is 20 times faster than it.
Soon the media have used mathematics to situate the level of the card. The Iris Pro 5200 scored 1,015 points in the video card benchmark test and 1,400 points in Fire Strike, the popular test from graphics benchmark leader 3DMark. A twenty-fold increase in these results would place Intel’s next GPU alongside the NVIDIA RTX 3070 and AMD RX 6800.
While these values cannot be extrapolated directly and the ultimate performance of a graphics card depends on other factors, they at least fuel the hope that Intel will become more of an alternative in dedicated graphics. Industry and consumers need it in a time of stock shortages and high prices.
