This week, Acer introduced a notebook with Intel’s first discrete GPU DG1. ASUS anticipated this announcement in a certain way and presented such a notebook with an Intel GPU a few days earlier.

As part of the announcement of the figures for the third quarter 2020 spoke to Intel’s CEO Bob Swan about the GPU baptized DG1 and stated that it is currently being delivered to OEM customers. However, further details about the technical data of the DG1-GPU were not revealed. So it remains with the previous assumption of 96 ES, so the same Expansion stage as with the fastest Tiger Lake processors. However, a dedicated GPU with the same expansion level should clock much higher, as it can produce a higher power consumption and waste heat. For the Tiger Lake processors we have for a Core i7 – 1185 G7 with a clock rate of 1, 35 GHz a maximum power consumption 14 W measured – only for the integrated GPU. The dedicated variant should be allowed to accept significantly more without compromising the CPU package.

There is also uncertainty about the memory interface and the memory used. While one could actually assume the use of GDDR6, at least Acer has LPDDR4X as the storage solution of the DG1. The graphics memory is 4 GB – that much seems to be certain. Since the first notebooks with DG1-GPU will not be on the market until the fourth quarter, we will probably have to wait a little longer before we know the first performance data.

Power on for DG2

Somewhat surprisingly, Intel also spoke about DG2, the second generation of a dedicated GPU. The first tape out was over and Alpha Silicon is now in the laboratories to be tested there.

DG2 is not intended to be a simple successor to DG1, but a significantly more powerful version based on the Xe-HPG architecture. Intel announced this at the Architecture Day 2020. Among other things, the Xe-HPG architecture is intended to provide hardware acceleration for ray tracing calculations and is Intel’s first approach for the gaming GPU generations that will follow and that will range from the entry-level to the high-end segment. DG2 should “take our discrete graphics capability up the stack into the enthusiast segment.”

Just like for DG1, it is still completely unclear what the technical data looks like for DG2. DG2 will not be manufactured by Intel itself, but completely externally. The DG2-GPU should be one of the most important future projects, which will fall back on an external production.