Intel Linux Driver Adds New DG2 "G12" Graphics Variant

To date the Intel Linux graphics driver has supported Intel's DG2 "Alchemist" G10 and G11 sub-platforms/variants as the main designs to this point. However, at the end of last year we began seeing "G12" references surface in their compute stack and now the Intel open-source Linux kernel driver is formally preparing the DG2-G12 variant support.

Posted a few minutes ago were the first Intel "i915" Linux kernel graphics driver patches for bringing up the new G12 sub-platform.

Intel DG2-G12 Linux driver support is on the way.

The patch just deals with a dozen lines of code and doesn't really reveal any juicy details. For now it's just treated as a new sub-platform and sharing the existing workarounds as with DG2-G10 and DG2-G11.

The patch message does note:

Another fork of the DG2 design has appeared, known as "DG2-G12;" let's add it as a new subplatform. As with G11, the GT stepping resets back to A0 (so a DG2-G12 A0 is similar, but not identical, to a DG2-G10 C0) but the display steppings continue to use the same numbering scheme as G10 and G11.

Some existing DG2 workarounds are starting to be extended to the DG2-G12 subplatform. So far only workarounds that were "permanent" for both DG2-G10 and DG2-G11 have been tagged for DG2-G12, but more stepping-specific workarounds are likely to show up in the future.

Time will tell what more G10/G11 vs. G12 differences for DG2 Alchemist graphics hardware come as a result of future Linux driver patches. Given we are only seeing these DG2-G12 patches now, graphics processors using this sub-platform type presumably will not come until much later while Intel is still promoting by the end of Q1 that we should see the first Intel Arc graphics hardware shipping.