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Raja Koduri Possibly Hints at June 2020 Intel Xe Graphics Card Release
In a conspicuous Twitter post on Friday, Intel’s chief architect Raja Koduri seemingly hinted at a June 2020 announcement or release of the company’s forthcoming Xe graphics cards.
It is common knowledge by now among hardware enthusiasts that Intel will enter the discrete graphics market, as the company has been public about ever since taking Raja Koduri on board. In 2018, the company committed to a 2020 release schedule for the first of those Xe graphics card(s), which eventually will span from entry-level mobile all the way up to the data center, including gaming GPUs, and even exascale supercomputers with a Xe-based GPGPU that will serve as the launch vehicle for Intel's 7nm process.
As a refresher, Xe is another name for the Gen 12 graphics architecture, which will come in two micro-architecture variants, one optimized for consumers and one optimized for the data center.
However, so far Intel has not been willing to provide any more specific guidance beyond "first availability by end of 2020," although some rumors have placed the Xe-powered Tiger Lake CPUs in the first half of 2020. With the latest tweet from Raja Koduri, this might have changed.
The picture shows the backside of a Tesla Model S, whose custom license plate unambiguously reads ‘THINKXE.’ ("Think Xe.") Given Intel’s previous disclosures, also seeing ‘2020’ on the plate does not come as a surprise, and indeed gets one to think.
Most conspicuous is the June month on license plate. The June 2020 date seems too specific to be a coincidence. Intel might have an announcement, and perhaps even a release, planned for Computex in June 2020.
Meanwhile, another Twitter post on Thursday, from an unverified source, suggested that Lakefield-R will be another product based on Xe (based on some source code). The tweeter also says that the driver requirements for Lakefield-R and Ryefield are the same.
