Intel Offers New Xe Graphics Details, Product Updates At 2020 Architecture Day

This week Intel held their 2020 Architecture Day, albeit virtual due to the COVID-19 pandemic. A lot of interesting technical information was shared on both the hardware and software sides. Here are some of the interesting highlights.

Among the details shared during the day-long virtual event were:

- Intel oneAPI Gold will ship this year.

- Intel is introducing a new Windows driver and it's making use of IGC and IGC has been prototyped internally for Mesa.

- Xe HP as the company's first high performance chip has successfully powered on. Xe HP is currently being sampled to partners and will be available retail in 2021.

- Intel also announced "SG1" as their first server graphics card for data centers, complement DG1 on the desktop side. SG1 is being promoted for Android cloud gaming, video streaming, and other similar use-cases while will begin shipping later in 2020.

- Xe HPG as Intel's gaming-optimized graphics card and scaled up from Xe LP will start shipping in 2021. Xe HPG will feature hardware ray-tracing, GDDR6, and other features.

- On the Xe front, Intel also outlined Xe's new L1 data cache, support for up to 16MB of L3 cache, end-to-end compression, confirming the previously reported on Phoronix support for AV1 decompression, up to 2x encode/decode throughput, 12-bit end-to-end video pipeline, and more.

- Intel announced 10nm SuperFin technology as their combination of FinFET transistors with Super Metal Insulator Metal Capacitor technology. Intel states that 10nm SuperFin can allow a 5x increase in capacitance within the same footprint compared to current industry standards and a reduction in resistance by 30% while enhancing interconnect performance. Tiger Lake is Intel's first processor based on 10nm SuperFin technology.

- While Intel will be sharing more Tiger Lake details soon, they promise Tiger Lake to deliver "more than a generational increase in CPU performance" while also having the Xe LP graphics capabilities, Thunderbolt 4, and other new features.

- Intel confirmed that the Alder Lake hybrid architecture will feature a mix of Golden Cove and Gracemont cores for "great performance per Watt."

- Intel reaffirmed plans for shipping Ice Lake Xeon Scalable processors at the end of 2020 with PCIe 4.0, eight memory channels, and other new capabilities.

- Next year's Sapphire Rapids Xeon CPUs will be built on their 10nm SuperFin process while supporting DDR5, PCIe 4.0, Compute Express Link 1.1, and other previously discussed features.