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.
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For those that have been living under a rock and w onder who the man is, Raja Koduri was the guy behind many Radeon GPUs, and then moved to Intel where he is working on Xe amongst other things. Now, ...
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These rumors sound like the normal process of creating an entirely new product that Intel has never produced before. Still less efficient than the competition is? Drivers need work? Is that really a surprise? It would be more shocking to read the opposite.
I hope Intel succeeds. We could use a 3rd player.
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The problem is with Intel slow pace it will take years to at least be truly competitive with AMD / Nvidia ... you can't just build a GPU lineup in 1-2 years and even be competitive ... they will create some kind of "monster" that will maybe find its way in a very narrow niche but not a card that go against the latest flagship cards from the current competitors.
My hopes are up for NAVI high end cards but beating nvidia is a very hard job. AMD succeded vs Intel in the CPU segment this year and did manage some hard blows but with the history of AMD videocards vs NVIDIA they will have to do much more to be able to actually take the crown.
The years of development for both AMD/NVIDIA can't be matched by Intel with their IGPU experience or Raja *cough* former AMD ...
Competition is always good and thats why I hope in 5 years maybe Intel will be present on GPU market with something viable but I dont have a lifetime to wait for them ... in the meantime I will buy the best price/peformance ratio card .....
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These rumors sound like the normal process of creating an entirely new product that Intel has never produced before. Still less efficient than the competition is? Drivers need work? Is that really a surprise? It would be more shocking to read the opposite.
I hope Intel succeeds. We could use a 3rd player.
Intel has been making GPUs since the i740. I would love to have them as a legitimate 3rd player, but they seem unable to produce anything that anyone would like to use, except laptop users. Even in that case, every serious workstation laptop gets away from Intel GPUs the millisecond thermals allow it.
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well let's hope they can solve the problems ... i am wondering with arm hiring lead devs to optimise for graphics engines like unreal engine etc .... if arm is preparing to do a " Surprise now we are making Desktop Gpus too ! " most likely is for their mobile stuff ...but how awesome would be to have 4 gpu companies beating each other to the punch and have an all out price war ? ! !! i really wish
best of luck on all of em ... more competition is good for our pockets !
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the i740 was not an Intel design, like many of intel's GMA chips it was a design inherited through company aquisition and technology agreements.
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Intel better aim for enterprise sector with their GPUs rather than consumers.
Knowing their product pricing I doubt they can compete with Nvidia and AMD.
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I'm sure they will squueze out something next year. Question is - how good it will be?
Consumer GPU market badly needs competition. Otherwise 3080Ti @1500+ Eur.
has been said by pretty much all the pc hardware journalists (I mean youtubers and websites) that this would be a work gpu and not a gaming one so it'll be a 3080ti >< I hope it wont be 1500€
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Intel being Intel, what's new?
And I sure hope Raja burn in hell, putting HBM on consumer products was the worst ever decision to make at the time.
2080Ti is already +1500€ here, more like +2000€.
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Intel being Intel, what's new?
And I sure hope Raja burn in hell, putting HBM on consumer products was the worst ever decision to make at the time.
2080Ti is already +1500€ here, more like +2000€.
It was only way to deliver competitive performance in 300W TDP with given GPU architecture and manufacturing process. Especially since at that point GCN needed pretty high memory bandwidth. And Fiji gained more from HBM OC than from core OC.
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Me and my boys STILL waiting for INTEL to get their s**t in order:

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Seems a lot like their CPUs...
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Intel seems that got into some deep trouble. Aging cpu performance, inability to provide gpu breakthrough. I wonder all those billions spent, more money than amd and Nvidia together, were are those now? Lost capital?
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These rumors sound like the normal process of creating an entirely new product that Intel has never produced before. Still less efficient than the competition is? Drivers need work? Is that really a surprise? It would be more shocking to read the opposite.
I hope Intel succeeds. We could use a 3rd player.
This^^ No matter how much talent or money Intel has available, developing a GPU from scratch is going to take time and effort before they can be as good as AMD or Nvidia, who have been doing it for the 20 or 30 years.
I just hope Intel is in this for the long run otherwise they will pull the plug pretty quickly...
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Where Intel's money is? I know where it comes from:

And look at the mid, right, chip technology.
And also look at bottom right, accelerators, no wonder Intel want's to grab that part as well (competing with Nvidia there), completing their supercomputer segment to become the monopoly competitor.
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I'm sure they will squueze out something next year. Question is - how good it will be?
Consumer GPU market badly needs competition. Otherwise 3080Ti @1500+ Eur.