Xe DG2. Intel vs. NVIDIA and AMD in graphics
Intel Xe DG2 will be the next graphics card that the chip giant puts on the market and the first that we can actually buy since the DG1 is not intended for the retail segment but will only be sold to system integrators to install in new equipment. Will it be a real alternative to the NVIDIA and AMD catalog? Will it be able to rank high among the fastest graphics on the market?
The global graphics segment will reach revenues of $ 200 billion in 2027, according to the forecasts of some analysts. The games and their hyper-realistic graphics; 4K and 8K displays; what comes from AV / VR; the popularity of the Internet of Things (IoT); artificial intelligence; machine learning and, of course, cryptocurrency mining, will be the main fields to achieve a spectacular turnover.
Intel is the world's leading manufacturer of graphics chips thanks to the integrated ones that are included in its processors, but it cannot compete in terms of performance with the big players in the sector: NVIDIA and AMD. At the beginning of the last decade, it initiated an ambitious strategy to re-enter the dedicated graphics segment from which it had been away for twenty years.
Intel's new Core and Visual Computing Group graphics division took shape under the leadership of Raja Koduri (former head of AMD's Radeon Technologies group) and other talented engineers. Most recently, Tom Petersen, former Technical Director of Marketing at NVIDIA, joined the group. Although we had already seen a part of his work in the last integrates, at the beginning of this year Intel started its commercial activity with the launch of the DG1. It was a start, although this GPU is limited in performance and availability.
Intel Xe DG2 will be much more interesting, but can it really compete? Although its final specifications are not known, Raja Koduri has published a clue that can put us in situation.
From 2012 to 2021 - same Intel Folsom lab, many of the same engineers with more gray hair, I was at Apple back then, getting hands on with pre-production crystalwell, 9 years later playing with a GPU that’s> 20x faster! pic.twitter.com/RgmRJuhOXw
- Raja Koduri (@Rajaontheedge) March 12, 2021
In the image you can see the chief architect of GPUs at Intel working in a laboratory with the Intel Iris Pro 5200. It was 2012 and according to the engineer, nine years later the graphics they are working on (Intel Xe DG2) is 20 times faster than her.
Soon the media we have pulled math to locate the level of the card. The Iris Pro 5200 scored 1,015 points in the VideoCard benchmark and 1,400 points in Fire Strike, the popular test from the leader in 3DMark graphics benchmarks. Multiplying by twenty those results the next Intel GPU would be placed next to the NVIDIA RTX 3070 and AMD RX 6800 graphics.
While these values cannot be extrapolated directly and the ultimate performance of a graphics card depends on other factors, they at least fuel the hope that Intel will become yet another alternative in dedicated graphics. Industry and consumers need it in a time of lack of stock and high prices.
