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Intel Xe discrete GPUs will sell from $199 and upwards

by Mark Tyson on 2 August 2019, 12:31

Tags: Intel (NASDAQ:INTC)

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Intel discrete GPU plans

At the start of this week it was interesting to see some indication of Intel's Gen12 and Xe dGPU plans. An Intel test graphics driver was rather too revealing for Intel (in its code strings) and has since been removed, but not before various insights and indications could be gleaned from the data.

Today we see some news about Intel's pricing intentions, as it prepares to enter the dGPU market. Raja Koduri, Intel's chief architect and senior vice president of architecture, software and graphics, was interviewed by a Russian YouTube tech channel and the chat published yesterday.

As TechPowerUp reports, much of the interview is run-of-the-mill stuff, about Koduri's career moves but it moves along to plans for Intel discrete GPUs. If you skip forward to about 6 minutes 15s in the video and make sure you have English auto-translate captions turned on (if you don't speak Russian), then you will see/hear Koduri confirm an aggressive price strategy for Intel graphics.

The overall plan is to capture high-volume price-points, to bring an affordable, good performing GPUs to the masses - "GPUs for everyone," says Koduri. He likens the strategy to AMD's positioning of the RX 480 / RX 580 under his tenure. Strategy will be necessarily about price, for Intel, until it can gain a strong user base etc.

Early Ice Lake benchmarks

The HEXUS editor penned an overview of the new Intel Ice Lake-based 10th Gen Core mobile CPUs yesterday to coincide with the launch. However, I note some sites are fortunate enough to get their hands on some test model laptops featuring these processors already.

For example PCMag, which has compared a pair of Ice Lake test systems (15W, and 25W) against the likes of the Microsoft Surface Go (Pentium Gold 4415Y), the Asus ZenBook 14 (Core i7-8565U), and the Acer Aspire 3 (Ryzen 5 APU). As often is the case in laptop comparisons none of the results will be definitive, just indications, depending upon various factors like supporting hardware components.

Click to zoom charts

PCMag has run through quite a number of tests, and they are interesting to see. I've included a trio of the graphs but there are many more available through the gamut of apps, synthetic benchmarks and games. Overall the results seem to be quite impressive and might require AMD to strike back with new mobile APUs sooner rather than later - depending on the pricing of upcoming Ice Lake portables.



HEXUS Forums :: 20 Comments

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AMD to strike back with new mobile APUs sooner rather than later - depending on the pricing of upcoming Ice Lake portables.

For a budget laptop with an ageing mid range 2500U APU which is sold (and therefore I expect benchmarked here) with single channel ram I think the 2500U did rather well.
DanceswithUnix
For a budget laptop with an ageing mid range 2500U APU which is sold (and therefore I expect benchmarked here) with single channel ram I think the 2500U did rather well.

Agreed, even more so when you consider the ryzen 5 2500U is ‘mid range’ and the intel i7-1065G7 is intel's top of the line 15/25W cpu according to yesterdays article and will likely be priced to go up against the ryzen 7 range…. which funnily enough just happens to be missing from the charts…
LSG501
DanceswithUnix
For a budget laptop with an ageing mid range 2500U APU which is sold (and therefore I expect benchmarked here) with single channel ram I think the 2500U did rather well.

Agreed, even more so when you consider the ryzen 5 2500U is ‘mid range’ and the intel i7-1065G7 is intel's top of the line 15/25W cpu according to yesterdays article and will likely be priced to go up against the ryzen 7 range…. which funnily enough just happens to be missing from the charts…

Intel putting themselves on the back foot? Perish the thought that could ever happen.
To build a strong user base from scratch at that price point, Intel gpus will need to beat up the competetion with no debate in the reviews and with amazing drivers support. Intel has a lot of money but it seems like a gargantuan objective from my standing pov. And for Koduri to bring his work from AMD to Intel(by that I mean he said that ‘he likens AMD’s strategy' that he probably created himself before leaving lol) also seems kind of odd. Wait & see as they say but all of this feels kind of strange with nothing to really grasp from at the moment.
It is going to take a long time to build up confidence in their products when the established main players have been doing discrete graphics cards for years. Even if performance was quite competitve at whatever price point they chose for each card, $199 or above is quite alot to take a gamble on when factoring in drivers and future support. If the project is halted in a couple of years, then I doubt they'd still be pushing regular driver updates. Most people will likely just stick with what they know, unless Intel seriously undercut their rivals, which is hard to imagine Intel doing. Perhaps they'll get some Intel fanbois to buy, and people who are after a potential novelty in the future, but initially it will be hard to gain momentum until they've had at least a couple of years under their belt.