Intel slide leak reveals details on upcoming high-end ’tile based’ Intel Xe GPU

Back at CES, Intel showed off its first Xe-based GPU in action, but not the one we were hoping for. We are still waiting to see Intel's first high-power discrete graphics card and thanks to a leak this week, we know a little bit more about one of the bigger Xe GPUs Intel is working on, codenamed ‘Arctic Sound'. 

The folks over at DigitalTrends have leaked an Intel presentation slide going into a bit more detail on the future GPU, including a 'tile module' design using multiple die packaged together using Foveros 3D stacking. The ‘Arctic Sound' GPU would use a full four tiles, with up to 512 execution units and up to a 500W TDP.

Arctic Sound would be for data centres, but Videocardz speculates that 2-tile and 1-tile designs with reduced TDPs could be used to tackle the gaming market. An Intel Xe 2-tile GPU would theoretically have up to 256 Execution Units and up to a 300W TDP, while a 1-tile GPU would have a lower 128 Execution Unit count and a smaller 150W TDP range.

We don't know exactly what to expect in terms of performance from a design like this but Intel does appear to have scaling all figured out to enable multiple SKUs. Intel still has a 2020 target launch window for the first Intel Xe GPU, so perhaps we'll hear more over the next few months, with big events like GDC and Computex coming up.

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KitGuru Says: The gaming GPU market could do with a little extra competition at the moment, so most of us will be hoping for a decent set of high-end and mid-range Xe graphics options. However, it does seem like data centre and mobile/laptops are going to be the first areas to be addressed. Either way, this is going to be a particularly interesting year as we await Nvidia's Turing follow-up, AMD's ‘Big Navi' and of course, the launch of Intel Xe. 

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