Intel planning Xe-HPG based cloud gaming and media streaming products
Intel Xe-HP microarchitecture first announced by Intel in mid-2020 is a multi-tile GPU series designed for data centers, with the main purpose as media super-computer accelerators. The company has developed as many as three variants featuring from 1 to 4 tiles.
Intel Xe-HPG (Gaming) Design, Source: Moore’s Law Is Dead/Notebookcheck
Earlier this week Raja Koduri said that Xe-HP Arctic Sound GPUs will be canned. Intel is currently not planning to produce these data center processors for any other use than their own cloud servers. This was surprising information considering how much time Intel has spent promoting these GPUs. As it turns out, Intel will be focusing on Xe-HPG (gaming) and Xe-HPC (high-performance data center) products moving forward.
Raja Koduri later clarified that Xe-HP was used to build a developer ecosystem for Ponte Vecchio’s (Xe-HPC) architecture. When it comes to the products themselves, Koduri confirmed Xe-HPG products are now to replace HP on the product roadmap with AI interference and visual cloud purposes in mind, so more or less what Xe-HP was meant to be.
We leveraged Xe HP to build developer ecosystem for HPC, AI and Visual cloud. It’s being used on-site at Argonne and other customers.
We’ll have Xe HPG based data center products for visual cloud/AI Inference and Xe HPC based products for HPC/AI Training @intelgraphics pic.twitter.com/iHZa2dMLqd— Raja Koduri (@Rajaontheedge) October 30, 2021
Visual Cloud includes media processing, media analytics, immersive media, cloud graphics, and cloud gaming. In other words, Xe-HPG architecture may be used for services such as game streaming similar to GeForce NOW or Google Stadia.
It may also be deployed on media conversion servers or by video content providers. A typical use for this type of content is video broadcasting by television. Intel was a hardware provider for Toyko Olympics where the Xeon-based servers were used to stream 8K 60 FPS HDR video to the cloud. A more powerful and optimized platform could extend Intel’s presence in this specialized market.
Koduri also mentioned that Xe-HPG will support professional applications such as 3DS Max, suggesting that Xe-HPG will also be offered in the workstation market. That said, the Xe-HPG microarchitecture might be offered for as many as three different markets similarly to NVIDIA Ampere or AMD RDNA2 architectures.
Intel Xe-HP Arctic Sound GPUs, Source: Igor’sLAB
| Intel Xe Graphics Commercial Products | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Xe-LP | Xe-HPG | Xe-HP | Xe-HPC |
| Multimedia | Gaming / ? Workstation / ? Cloud / ? AI | Data Center /Exascale | |
