Intel Xe Rumors: Development reportedly stagnating and efficiency worse than its competitors

Intel received a lot of coverage on Xe, their enterprise and gaming GPU that should hit the market in 2020. The coverage was mostly due to the fact that several key staff from AMD moved to Intel to take control of the product. However, something is going on.

Last week several key staff members that last year joined the GPU team, left Intel. And now new rumors have surfaced, not particularly good ones. I will say this though, these are rumors, as vague as can be and nothing else. 

Intel's first dedicated graphics card Xe should be released June 2020 but was already pushed back to 'late' 2020. Rumors, however, seem to get significant delays and technical problems. Under the direction of chief architect Raja M. Koduri (ex-AMD), the first models based on the in-house 10nm design for the desktop, mobile applications, workstations and data centers should be available by 2020. More recently we have seen announcements forecasted for exascale servers codenamed Ponte Vecchio. Believing current rumors, it seems Intel's advances in the development of Xe GPUs have stalled. And the efficiency of the chips should be well below that of the competition. The information comes from the forum member »wjm47196« of the Chinese website Chiphell.com (via Wccftech). It is not clear where he obtained that information, but some of them are very vague and superficial, others are more detailed. We summarize the key statements in bullet points:

• Work on the Xe GPUs does not seem to be going well
• Ponte Vecchio is unlikely to arrive within the next two years
• Currently, the efficiency of the Xe architecture is relatively low compared to the competition
• For the time being, there are no plans for custom models of Xe graphics cards
• Drivers would need a lot of time to improve

An official statement from Intel is not available at the time of writing the message.

Intel has used Supercomputing 2019 (SC19) to announce a new category of GPUs based on the Xe architecture and was promoting the Xe GPUs as purpose-built for data centre artificial intelligence and high performance computing (HPC) workloads, rather than gaming. The chip giant has named the compute-focused graphics processing unit after a bridge in Florence -- the Ponte Vecchio.