Intel Xe will challenge AMD and Nvidia in 2020

Intel has previously announced that graphics cards in the Xe family will reach the market starting in 2020, and the company’s graphics manager Raja Koduri has even provided clear clues in image form. Industry analysts Digitimes are now publishing a report stating that dedicated graphics cards in the Xe series will be released in the summer of 2020.

According to the report, the dedicated graphics cards will be manufactured using the company’s renowned 10-nanometer technology. The initial round of graphics chips is not said to focus on the gaming market, but instead on data centers and artificial intelligence (AI) calculations, a market that rival Nvidia has invested heavily in in recent years.

Instead of purely targeting the gaming market, Intel is set to combine the new GPUs with its CPUs to create a competitive platform in a bid to pursuit business opportunities from datacenter, AI and machine learning applications and such a move is expected to directly affect Nvidia, which has been pushing its AI GPU platform in the datacenter market, the sources noted.

The information says nothing about what the Xe series will offer in terms of function. However, the fact that the graphics cards will be used in combination with processors to calculate AI may be an indication of how Intel plans to handle ray tracing. Game developer Wargaming recently unveiled a demo version of the game World of Tanks, using Intel technology to compute ray tracing with both processor and graphics card.

The solution is based on an Intel developer library called Embree, which in the World of Tanks implementation is used to calculate tree structures for light rays, while the graphics card’s shader units are used to perform the actual rendering. The solution is compatible with all graphics cards that support the DirectX 11 interface, and could potentially be the basis for ray tracing with the Intel Xe series.

Intel, which had twice entered the discrete graphics card market, but failed on both occasions, has decided to come back to the market again after having headhunted AMD’s ex-CTO of graphics Raja Koduri. Intel has established a R&D center in India with a team of engineers and is set to unveil its new 10nm Xe-based discrete graphics card series in 2020 and a 7nm GPU packaged using Foveros 3D technology in 2021.

Digitime’s report concludes with information that the Xe series is taking the step over to 7 nanometer manufacturing technology relatively quickly. This is said to take place as early as 2021 and is based on Intel’s Foveros technology, where circuits on different manufacturing technologies can be integrated on the same circuit surface.

Read more about the Intel Xe series: