Cover news reporter Cai Shiqi
At 11:00 p.m. Beijing time on March 30, Intel officially announced the latest progress of its discrete graphics: the independent graphics cards first released in the Intel Iris A series graphics product portfolio for notebook computers were officially opened for pre-order, and the A350M for ultra-thin books and A370M for thin and light performance jointly formed the Intel Iris A series graphics 3 series product line.
Intel says the more powerful 5 Series and 7 Series discrete graphics, as well as the desktop version, will arrive this summer.
The Intel Iris series is officially unveiled
The CPU overlord personally entered the house to do the full-stack operation of the processor graphics card and became the common choice of the big manufacturers
Since Intel announced its entry into the field of high-end discrete graphics last year, the outside world has been paying special attention to the trends of the X86 architecture inventor and CPU overlord in the field of high-performance graphics computing.
According to data released by mercury research in February this year, in the fourth quarter of 2021, Intel accounted for 75.4% of the CPU market share of the X86 architecture, AND 25.6%, subdivided into the desktop CPU field including IoT IoT devices, Intel's market share reached 83.8%, AMD was 16.2%, and the share of mobile CPUs including IoT devices was 78.4% and AMD was 21.6%.
Driven by the increasing demand for image processing in the market, in addition to the field of CPU computing, GPUs and even discrete graphics cards have begun to thrive. Since the 1980s and 1990s, Nvidia, ATi (acquired by AMD in 2006), 3Dfx (bankrupt in 2002) and other graphics processor manufacturers have been born, and in the past 20 years, NVIDIA and AMD have basically formed a pattern of two strong competitions in the field of unique display.
Discrete graphics cards are almost always dependent on the PCIe interface
Interestingly, the main access method of discrete graphics in computer systems today is based on the PCIe bus, that is, the graphics card is inserted into the common PCIe interface of the motherboard - the STANDARD of PCIe, which was jointly initiated by Intel, Dell, HP and IBM in 2003. This also means that the unique display products of the two major image chip giants at present, the interface into the computer system is provided by the CPU giant, and Intel's personal entry into the independent graphics card this time is an important action of the X86 architecture leader to integrate general computing and image processing.
Industry insiders analyzed that with the emergence of Apple's self-developed processor M series, the X86 architecture has emerged as a powerful challenger. Apple has shown that self-developed chips in some scenarios, can greatly improve the utilization of the computer bus, this time Intel launched a unique display, may be similar to Apple's M series processors, shouldering the task of improving bus efficiency, greatly increasing the performance of the platform, the trend of central processor and graphics processor brand unification, is emerging.
The emergence of Apple's M1 series chips has an important impact on the chip industry
Notebook graphics card first The platform with the highest public version rate has become a pioneer
The reporter learned that all products equipped with Intel Iris A series discrete graphics are based on Intel's new Xe HPG microarchitecture, supporting DirectX 12 Ultimate, ray tracing and super sampling.
Intel says the Xe core, which provides 16x the computing power for AI inference, can also help boost productivity, performance for workloads required for game and content creation compared to traditional GPU vector units, and the Xe media engine can accelerate numerous video codecs and support a wide range of industry standards, enabling industry AV1 hardware-accelerated encoding and decoding.
Sharp graphics cards use Xe HPG microarchitecture
The Xe display engine supports high-resolution, high-refresh HDR displays and supports the latest industry standards, such as the display Port 2.0 10G for uncompressed 4K @120Hz display refresh rate content.
According to Intel, the first Toei 3 Series discrete graphics to deliver a 1080p mainstream gaming and content creation experience. When running a variety of popular games, a laptop with the Sharp A370M can provide an experience of more than 60 frames per second at 1080p.
The more high-end RuiXuan 5 series and Ruixuan 7 series will add more Xe cores than the 3 series, as well as ray tracing units and larger capacity GDDR6 video memory.
What is very different from the CPU market is that the desktop graphics card circulation methods of the two mainstream graphics card manufacturers NVIDIA and AMD are now designed and produced by third-party brands under the specifications to provide core GPU chipsets to third-party cooperative manufacturers. For example, ASUS, EVGA, MSI, Gigabyte, Rainbow, Soté, Sapphire and other manufacturers are Nvidia, AMD's AIC, AIB partners, and the graphics cards they produce are also known as "non-public versions". The "public" graphics cards directly produced and sold by NVIDIA and AMD are relatively rare in number, more like an early reference version, but the popularity of "non-public" graphics cards has also led to the same chipset of different manufacturers to a certain extent, and there are no small differences in performance release.
The unique display of the notebook computer does not exist "non-public version", Lenovo, Dell, HP, Asus and other mainstream manufacturers to get the GPU chip and CPU, are directly from the chip manufacturer "public version", and the notebook computer heat dissipation design, is completed by the manufacturer itself, so the CPU and GPU in the same laptop force heat dissipation, power consumption and other conditions of the comprehensive performance, often a prosperity, a loss, so the notebook field, essentially is the independent graphics card "public version" rate of the highest rate of platform.
Intel has not yet announced the sharp desktop-level independent graphics, whether there is a "non-public version", and the strategy of the notebook alone display listing first means that the first batch of sharp graphics cards that enter the hands of consumers are "public version", which is more conducive to controlling the stability of product performance for chip manufacturers.
The positioning of the product line of Ruixuan 3-5-7 has been announced
The first laptops with The Sharp 3 Series discrete graphics cards are now available for pre-order, and laptops with the Sharp 5 Series and The Sharp 7 Series will be available early this summer. Intel Iris A-series graphics for desktops will also be available this summer.