Last week, Intel finally laid down its cards. Architecture Day 2021 saw the company deliver an array of truly exciting new products, stretching across CPUs and graphics, from laptop to datacentre. The firm is looking to massively accelerate its compute performance by a factor of 1000x over several years. It's a seemingly impossible task, but Intel wants to achieve it by leveraging the state of the art in CPU, GPU and integration technology. A core part of the strategy is in delivering competitive graphics performance – and that's where the new line of discrete GPUs from Intel comes to the fore… and they're looking superb.
Codenamed Alchemist, the new GPU looks to take Intel's existing graphics tech – found in integrated form in its Tiger Lake and in limited release via the DG1 graphics card – and expand it out in all directions. More execution units (96 in DG1, up to 512 in DG2), more power, more memory bandwidth plus all the speed and efficiency advantages of TSMC's new 6nm fabrication process.
But over and above that, there are new features too. In fact, looking at a block layout of the Alchemist GPU, we seemingly have a philosophy much closer to Nvidia's products rather than AMD's. Where Team Red focused on rasterisation performance and memory bandwidth optimisations over hardware acceleration RT and machine learning features, Intel offers a balance much closer to the GeForce line, with significantly more silicon dedicated to those next-gen features.
