Announced and then canned it in the past, but now it seems to live again. A few months ago AMDs primary GPU guru Raja Koduri made a move to Intel, who got the title Chief Architect and Senior Vice President of Core and Visual Computing Group, and weeks later, Intel talks about a GPU, a discrete one.
From the looks of it, Intel will enter the discrete GPU and is talkiong about a prototype chip of a discrete Intel GPU at ISSCC (IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference) in San Francisco, USA. As PC Watch writes today.
The talk is all that though, talk about a prototype with examples of the building blocks in the base design. The GPU would be based on existing Intel’s integrated GPU architecture but advances on that. This prototype GPU architecture is based on the latest Intel Graphics Gen 9 generation, Intel’s standard GPU core itself. However, the implementation is LP (low power), the GPU would be fabbed at 14 nm and see a die size of 8×8 mm with 1.5 Billion transistors. A GP102 from Nvidia like the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti as comparison holds, 12 Billion. So you can see that Intel starts low, do the groundwork and then scale upwards from there onwards. In the prototype chip each block (cluster) holds six EUs. While all these specs do not sound enticing for a super fast GPU, it’s might be the new groundwork and building block of what might become an advanced GPU, in the future.
Below you can check out all the charts and slides, again courtesy of Hirofumi Goto from PC Watch.