Intel Returns to Discrete Graphics Market
Intel is planning a return to the professional and consumer discrete graphics market. Intel's upcoming next-generation graphics card will primarily target personal user devices, data centers and AI technologies. To implement its own project, the company created and registered a trade brand called "Intel Xe", which was officially presented in December 2018. Intel Corporation, being a serious participant in the IT sphere, has every chance of becoming a competitor to Nvidia and AMD. However, they still have time to prepare for the arrival of a new player on the market. Intel plans to release the first GPU models in 2020. The company promises to establish continuous production of discrete video cards using 10-nanometer technology within the next two years. This technology is currently unavailable for Intel due to various technological problems. For this reason, the company is introducing 14nm products to the market. The issue should be resolved by mid-2019, and until that moment, there will be a shortage of Intel branded processors on the market, the cost of which will remain at the same level. Comparing the situation with its main competitors, AMD announced the release of the first 7nm processors based on the Zen 2 architecture next year. Another market player, Nvidia, is also embracing more advanced next generation technology. The new Intel Xe graphics card will be based on a proprietary architecture, the technical details of which are still kept in strict confidence to avoid information leakage. Intel said that Intel's efforts are mainly focused on professional-grade GPUs, but the family of future graphics cards will include gaming and entry-level devices. Both professional and consumer video adapters will get the same basic architecture, but will have many distinctive elements. This will allow the company to expand the line of models, each of which, due to the presence of unique parts, is designed for specific user tasks.
For Intel, discrete graphics are not new. Some time ago, the company successfully competed with other market leaders, including Nvidia, which has survived to this day. The first Intel graphics card was presented 20 years ago (1998). The model came out under the name i740 and differed in versions with PCI and AGP interfaces. For its time, the card, produced using 350-nanometer technology, was quite advanced in its technical capabilities. Among its characteristics was support for all API functions DirectX 5.0 and OpenGL 1.1 at a resolution of 1600x1200, 4 and 8 MB of memory, 160 Hz vertical scanning, 16-bit color depth. Soon the i752 (AGP 4X interface) and i754 (AGP 2X interface) appeared on the market. Over time, Intel began to specialize in the production of integrated graphics processors. The most recent among them was Intel's 11th generation UHD Graphics Gen11, introduced in 2018. Ice Lake chipsets will be powered by Gen11 cards, which will be announced in 2019. The Topic of Article: Intel Returns to Discrete Graphics Market. |
