At CES 2020, Intel brought more Xe independent display chip products, and in addition to the notebook products equipped, Intel actually prepared a version of “Independent Graphics Card”, called “DG1 Software Development Vehicle” . The purpose of this card is not an Intel-only prototype in the future, but rather for game developers to optimize the software so that when Xe is officially launched, it can perform best in most games.
As far as we know, although Intel’s Xe is said to be “single display”, it is only a package independent of the CPU. Whether it will exist as an independent graphics card is still unknown. It is more likely that it will be sold next to the CPU on the circuit board. However, it is not clear whether Xe will replace the Iris internal display or whether the two will work together. At least we know that if Intel wants to make Xe a graphics card type, it is entirely possible.
Gallery: Intel DG1 software development vehicle card | 6 Photos
In addition, Intel confirmed that Xe will have three grades named Xe-LP, Xe-HP, and Xe-HPC. The former is an abbreviation of “Low Power”. Although it is called low power consumption, it is actually a version for gaming machines. The HP in the middle is the abbreviation of “High Performance”. This version is set for content creators. The final HPC is the abbreviation of “High Performace Computing”, which means that its functions are accelerated to calculations instead of displayed.
It’s too early to talk about performance data at this stage, but Intel promises that it will arrive at the end of this year with the 10nm Tiger Lake processor, and it is estimated that the display performance should be more than twice that of the existing Ice Lake. At the same time, Tiger Lake itself will have “double-digit” performance improvements and “huge” CPU improvements, but there are no further figures beyond that. Maybe we won’t be able to get more specific news until we are near Computex?