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posted by martyb on Sunday March 31 2019, @10:18PM   Printer-friendly
from the never-mind-Moore's-law-what-about-Amdahl's-law? dept.

Intel has teased* plans to return to the discrete graphics market in 2020. Now, some of those plans have leaked. Intel's Xe branded GPUs will apparently use an architecture capable of scaling to "any number" of GPUs that are connected by a multi-chip module (MCM). The "e" in Xe is meant to represent the number of GPU dies, with one of the first products being called X2/X2:

Developers won't need to worry about optimizing their code for multi-GPU, the OneAPI will take care of all that. This will also allow the company to beat the foundry's usual lithographic limit of dies that is currently in the range of ~800mm2. Why have one 800mm2 die when you can have two 600mm2 dies (the lower the size of the die, the higher the yield) or four 400mm2 ones? Armed with One API and the Xe macroarchitecture Intel plans to ramp all the way up to Octa GPUs by 2024. From this roadmap, it seems like the first Xe class of GPUs will be X2.

The tentative timeline for the first X2 class of GPUs was also revealed: June 31st, 2020. This will be followed by the X4 class sometime in 2021. It looks like Intel plans to add two more cores [dies] every year so we should have the X8 class by 2024. Assuming Intel has the scaling solution down pat, it should actually be very easy to scale these up. The only concern here would be the packaging yield – which Intel should be more than capable of handling and binning should take care of any wastage issues quite easily. Neither NVIDIA nor AMD have yet gone down the MCM path and if Intel can truly deliver on this design then the sky's the limit.

AMD has made extensive use of MCMs in its Zen CPUs, but will reportedly not use an MCM-based design for its upcoming Navi GPUs. Nvidia has published research into MCM GPUs but has yet to introduce products using such a design.

Intel will use an MCM for its upcoming 48-core "Cascade Lake" Xeon CPUs. They are also planning on using "chiplets" in other CPUs and mixing big and small CPU cores and/or cores made on different process nodes.

*Previously: Intel Planning a Return to the Discrete GPU Market, Nvidia CEO Responds
Intel Discrete GPU Planned to be Released in 2020
Intel Announces "Sunny Cove", Gen11 Graphics, Discrete Graphics Brand Name, 3D Packaging, and More

Related: Intel Integrates LTE Modem Into Custom Multi-Chip Module for New HP Laptop
Intel Promises "10nm" Chips by the End of 2019, and More


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  • (Score: 2) by driverless on Monday April 01 2019, @05:15AM (1 child)

    by driverless (4770) on Monday April 01 2019, @05:15AM (#822974)

    They're not late to the game, they've been trying to get in since the i740 twenty years ago (the 82720 doesn't really count since it was a rebadged NEC design), and have failed to penetrate anything but the budget market every single time they've tried. This is another attempt that'll fail, they may be big in the CPU world but they can't compete with nVidia/ATI-AMD who have been doing this for their entire corporate lives.

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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Monday April 01 2019, @05:28AM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Monday April 01 2019, @05:28AM (#822977) Journal

    Intel Larrabee [wikipedia.org] was a failed Intel GPU effort that later became the basis of the "manycore" Xeon Phi [wikipedia.org] chips, that have seen use in supercomputers and machine learning.

    https://www.nextplatform.com/2018/07/27/end-of-the-line-for-xeon-phi-its-all-xeon-from-here/ [nextplatform.com]
    https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/06/13/intel_gpus_2020/ [theregister.co.uk]

    Xeon Phi was discontinued. In its place, Intel will sell Xeons with lots of cores (like 48-core Cascade Lake, and more cores are sure to be added as Intel expands its use of MCMs to try to compete with AMD's Epyc, Threadripper, and Ryzen) and these new discrete GPUs. Intel sees Nvidia making a lot of money selling GPUs for machine learning, driverless vehicles, etc. and wants a piece of that pie. Even the market for high-end gaming GPUs has been pretty strong, and could remain so if high-spec VR becomes the driver of upgrades. MCMs consist of multiple dies; Intel can pick and choose which ones go into the server/enterprise products, and leave the scrappier ones for the gamers.

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