Intel has been keeping the lid tightly shut on all matters Xe related. The last time we heard anything about the chipmaker’s first discrete GPU was back in February, when Raja Koduri, its Chief Architect for Graphics, hinted at the Xe-HPG capabilities and its support for DirectX 12 Ultimate.
Fast forward to today and word on the wire is that we could be looking at a discrete GPU with performance on par with NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 3070, if his recent tweet is anything to go by. Breaking it down, Koduri’s tweet shows two pictures from different time periods at Intel’s Folsom Lab. The takeaway here is the last bit of his tweet, where he proclaims that he is playing with a GPU that is approximately “20x faster” than a pre-production Crystal Well.
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
For those unfamiliar with that name, Crystal Well is what we know now as Intel’s Haswell CPU lineup; back then, the lineup’s integrated graphics was known as the Iris Pro 5200, which in turn was a part of the top-of-the-line CPU at the time, the Core i7-4770K.
While it may seem like Koduri is merely making a passing remark about Xe-HPG, there is actually some truth behind it. Thanks to PC World, we know that the Iris Pro 5200 had a UL Fire Strike’s graphics score of 1450 points. Multiply that by 20, and the number you’re looking at is 29000 points; that’s more or less on the level of the aforementioned RTX 3070.
That said, Koduri’s tweet is still, nevertheless, cryptic, and much of what we’ve talked about is still unconfirmed and mere speculation of what we can expect from Intel’s Xe HPG. So, until an official announcement by Intel, take this news with a large grain of salt.
