Intel would love just about anything to take the heat away from all that speculative execution stuff. I’m not sure if leaked specs for “Ice Lake”, its next line of processors, is the sort of news it was looking for, but it’ll do… for a few days, at least.
When it comes to graphics performance, Intel has always lagged behind the likes of NVIDIA and AMD. Which makes sense — powering the 3D visuals of the latest games isn’t a big priority for the chip maker. That said, if Intel’s engineers can boost their integrated GPUs without compromising elsewhere, it would make sense to take those gains.
A couple of days ago, a listing on SiSoftware’s ranking site popped up with the ID of “Intel(R) UHD Graphics, Gen11 LP ci-main-68861 (384SP 48C 600MHz, 768kB L2, 6GB) (OpenCL)”.
The specifications suggest that, from a purely hardware standpoint, Ice Lake will be twice as powerful as its Kaby Lake / Coffee Lake predecessors, sporting 48 execution units (EU) compared to 24. As TechPowerUp’s btarunr explains, the EU count for Ice Lake works out to be 384 unified shader units, if you want to size it up against discrete GPUs.
On top of this, Ice Lake will be clocked at 600MHz — again twice as fast as the previous generation hardware.
How has Intel managed the massive boost? TechPowerUp puts it down to the smaller manufacturing process: 10nm, 4nm smaller than Kaby Lake.
Sure, Intel won’t be eclipsing your GeForce or RADEON card anytime soon, but the company’s iGPUs are slowly becoming… OK-ish… if you just want to play the odd undemanding game.
[SiSoftware, via TechPowerUp]