Intel shows separate DG1 video card for developers

Intel gave a preview of the DG1, the company’s first separate video card, during CES. This is a card specifically for software development, which will not be made available to consumers as such.

Intel sends samples of the card to independent software vendors, who can get started on optimizing software for Intel’s Xe architecture for GPUs. Xe GPUs are planned to be launched this year as part of the Tiger Lake platform for laptops and as a separate chip.

During a press presentation, Intel demonstrated the GPU at a resolution of 1080p at approximately 30fps, adding that it is still early chips and drivers. Intel further clarified that the DG1 video card will offer dynamic tuning for power-efficient platforms and that the card is not only for gaming, but also for graphics applications. It therefore seems that the company is primarily focusing on use for laptops and the entry-level market. That’s no surprise: information appeared at the end of December that the first implementations of Xe over 96 execution units possess. Intel’s most powerful integrated GPU to date is the Iris Pro Graphics P580, or GT4e, with 72 execution units, although that GPU is based on a different architecture.

Intel expects to eventually deploy the Xe architecture for GPUs for a range of products, from low-performance applications such as energy-efficient laptops, to high-performance workstations, data centers and even high-performance computing such as exascale clusters.

At the end of 2017, it became clear that Intel wanted to develop dedicated GPUs, when it founded a new Core and Visual Computing Group, with Raja Koduri at the helm. He previously worked at AMD Radeon. Incidentally, Intel also introduced separate GPUs in 1998, the i740 and i752, but they were not exactly successful and Intel quickly left the market for dedicated graphics chips.