The Intel Xe-LP GPU Architecture Deep Dive: Building Up The Next Generation

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As part of today’s Intel Architecture Day, Intel is devoting a good bit of its time to talking about the company’s GPU architecture plans. Though not a shy spot for Intel, per-se, the company is still best known for its CPU cores, and the amount of marketing attention they’ve put into the graphics side of their business has always been a bit weaker as a result. But, like so many other things at Intel, times are changing – not only is Intel devoting ever more die real estate to GPUs, but over the next two years they are transitioning into a true third player in the PC GPU space, launching their first new discrete GPU in several generations.

As part of Intel’s previously-announced Xe GPU architecture, the company intends to become a top-to-bottom GPU provider. This means offering discrete and integrated GPUs for everything from datacenters and HPC clusters to high-end gaming machines and laptops. This is a massive expansion for a company whom for the last decade has only been offering integrated GPUs, and one that has required a lot of engineering to get here. But, at long last, after a couple of years of talking up Xe and laying out their vision, Xe is about to become a reality for Intel’s customers.

While we’ll focus on different Xe-related announcements in separate articles – with this one focusing on Xe-LP – let’s quickly recap the state of Intel’s Xe plans, what’s new as of today, and where Xe-LP fits into the bigger picture.

When first announced back in 2018, Intel laid out plans for a single GPU architecture, Xe, comprised of three different microarchitectures: Xe-LP, Xe-HP, and Xe-HPC. Spanning the market from the bottom to the top respectively, Xe-LP would go into integrated and entry-level discrete graphics, Xe-HP into enthusiast and datacenter parts, and finally Xe-HPC would be for high performance computing clusters such as the upcoming Aurora supercomputer, the US Department of Energy’s long-awaited exaflop machine.

Since then, Intel has revised that plan a bit, and what was three microarchitectures is now four. Being announced as part of Intel Architecture Day today, Intel is revealing Xe-HPG, an additional microarchitecture for gaming-focused chips. We have more on Xe-HPG in this article, but at a high level it’s meant to be the missing piece of the puzzle in Intel’s product stack, offering a high-performance gaming and graphics-focused chip as opposed to Xe-HP, which is specializing in datacenter features like FP64 and multi-tile scalability. Xe-HPG is set to arrive in 2021, and notably will be built entirely at a third-party fab, unlike the rest of the Xe family.

Which to bring things back to the immediate topic of Xe-LP, makes this year’s launch of Intel’s first Xe microarchitecture all the more important. Intel’s plans for Xe involve building up successive Xe parts – quite literally in Xe-HPC’s case – going for wider designs that incorporate ever increasing numbers of base building blocks, and then scaling out the number of GPUs when even that isn’t enough. So Xe-LP is very much the foundation of the Xe family, not just in diagrams but in architecture as well; and consequently, what Intel has designed for Xe-LP will have repercussions for the entire Xe product stack.
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