Intel’s graphics chief Raja Koduri published the first ‘official’ image of Intel’s upcoming gaming graphics processor based on the Xe-HPG architecture. Koduri also confirmed that at least one of the company’s DG2 GPUs will feature 512 EUs. 

“Xe-HPG (DG2) real candy – very productive time at the Folsom lab couple of weeks ago,” Raja Koduri wrote in a Twitter post.”[…] Lots of game and driver optimization work ahead for Lisa Pierce’s software team. They are all very excited and a little scared.” 

Intel’s Xe-HPG architecture employs energy-efficient processing blocks from the Xe-LP architecture, high frequency optimizations developed for Xe-HP/Xe-HPC GPUs for data centers and supercomputers, high-bandwidth internal interconnections, hardware-accelerated ray-tracing support, and a GDDR6-powered memory subsystem. The DG2 family GPUs are set to be manufactured at TSMC and are projected to hit the market in late 2021 or early 2022.

At present, Intel’s highest-performance discrete GPU is based on the Xe-LP architecture and features 96 EUs. Therefore, an Xe-HPG-powered graphics processor with 512 EUs will offer significantly higher performance than Intel’s existing standalone GPU. Rumor has it that the performance of Intel’s graphics processor with 512 EUs will be close to that of Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3080.