Explanation Needed: What is Intel Xe?

Pc enthusiasts who follow the computing hardware industry know that NVIDIA and AMD dominate the GPU space. But competition within the GPU space is about to be heated as Intel is in the process of releasing a new lineup of discrete GPUs that fall under the branded name Intel Xe.

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Before diving deep into Intel, Xe is talking about Intel's brief history with discrete GPUs.Intel's first attempt at producing discrete graphics cards took place in 1998 when they released the Intel 740, an abject failure due to poor performance. Ten years later, Intel made a second attempt with the Larrabee architecture, only for the company to scrap it off the market.

The Intel Xe will consist of a slew of a new set of architectural instructions. Intel's GPU product lineup goes as follows;

The Xe-LP

A low-powered GPU integrated into the 11th-generation Rocket Lake processor and Iris Xe Max mobile GPU, codename DG1. This particular GPU is currently in a few laptops on the market. One of them being the Lenovo L13 Yoga 2.

The Xe-HPG

The Xe-HPG target is mainstream consumers and PC enthusiasts who are seeking optimal gaming performance. Interestingly, like its counterparts (AMD and Nvidia), this GPU will also support hardware-accelerated Ray tracing.

The Xe-HP

This particular GPU variant will primarily be used in data centers, optimized for FP64 performance.

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