Intel?s run at the GPU market begins with Tiger Lake onboard graphics

Further ReadingIntel’s Tiger Lake CPUs are ready to take on Ryzen 4000 mobileAt Intel Architecture Day 2020, most of the focus and buzz surrounded the upcoming Tiger Lake 10nm laptop CPUs—but Intel also announced advancements in their Xe GPU technology, strategy, and planning that could shake up the industry in the next couple of years.Integrated Xe graphics are likely to be one of the Tiger Lake laptop CPU's best features. The problem here is that you can't easily port code written for Nvidia CUDA to an x86 CPU—so a developer needs to make hard choices about what architectures to plan for and support, and those choices impact code maintainability as well as performance down the road.Although Intel's OneAPI framework is truly open, and Intel invites hardware developers to write their own libraries for non-Intel parts, Xe graphics are obviously a first-class citizen there—as are Intel CPUs. The siren call of deep learning libraries written once, and maintained once, to run on dedicated GPUs, integrated GPUs, and x86 CPUs may be enough to attract serious AI dev interest in Xe graphics, where simply competing on performance would not.As always, it's a good idea to maintain some healthy skepticism when vendors make claims about unreleased hardware. If Intel succeeds in expanding this "it just works" expectation to deep-learning development, with OneAPI, we think it's got a real shot at breaking Nvidia's current lock on the deep learning GPU market.In the meantime, we're looking very much forward to seeing Xe LP graphics debut in the real world, when Tiger Lake launches in September.You must login or create an account to comment.Join the Ars Orbital Transmission mailing list to get weekly updates delivered to your inbox.