There's Certainly Much Interest In Linux On Intel's Future Discrete Graphics Cards

Intel's growing graphics team recently hosted a "Ask You Anything" on Reddit as they solicit more feedback and ideas from the community about their discrete graphics plans. From that, interest in their Linux graphics driver/software stack came in second for popularity.

The most discussed topic during this Reddit event about Intel graphics was about GPU preferences at 27% followed by the "Linux stack" at 15% and then branding/naming at 13% rounded out the top three -- and the only three items to each have more than 10%.

We appreciate the insights we received from our first AYA with the Reddit community last week! Today, @GChip shared the learnings to a room full of graphics engineers. pic.twitter.com/BCox4H6Qlc

— Intel Graphics (@IntelGraphics) December 14, 2018

The most popular comment as well was sayting "no proprietary blobs" as a request for this future Intel discrete GPU. Intel shared these findings on Twitter.

There's certainly much interest by Linux users in the Intel discrete graphics offerings considering the company's successful, long-standing open-source graphics driver support over the past decade. The Intel open-source driver stack is getting even better recently with the punctual support additions to the Intel ANV Vulkan driver, the new "Iris" Gallium3D OpenGL driver in development, the Intel OpenCL NEO driver taking shape this year, and the Intel DRM kernel driver continuing to pickup new features.

At this week's Intel Architecture Day we learned that their discrete and integrated graphics processors will share a common architecture they are calling "Xe" post-Gen11 Icelake graphics but details beyond that were minimal. It will certainly be exciting to learn more and see how their Linux driver support evolves as their first discrete GPUs are expected to debut in 2020.