Intel Xe-HP, leaked specs and photos of two models

Intel Xe-HP

About a month and a half ago we reported the first specifications relating to Intel's Xe-HPG line graphics cards, the first of the company to be addressed to the vast audience of gamers who, right now, are facing a chronic shortage of alternatives. on the market of popular NVIDIA and AMD. According to the latest rumors, the GPUs will support a PCIe 5.0 interface, GDDR6 memory running at 14GT / s or 16GT / s, HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort over USB Type-C. As for the number of Execution Units (EU), we are talking about figures ranging from 96 to 512 EU, with the top model that should offer performance comparable to a GeForce RTX 3070.

Credit: Igor's Lab In parallel with the Xe-HPG range, Intel is also working on the Xe-HP range, designed for workstations and data centers. Recently, colleagues from Igor's Lab published the specifications of the Intel Actic Sound Xe-HP 1T and 2T graphics cards, which were subsequently taken up by Wccftech. The first will have a "single slot full length" form factor and will be equipped with 384 EU for a total of 3,075 cores. HBME's on-board memory will be 16GB, capable of providing a bandwidth of 716GB / s, while the TDP will be 150W. The card will have a completely passive dissipation system, will need to receive power through an auxiliary 8-pin PCI connector and will be equipped with a PCI Express 4.0 interface.

Credit: Igor's Lab The second model, on the other hand, increases the number of EU to 960, offering 7,680 processing cores to perform calculations, among others, in the formats, FP32, FP64, BF16, FP16, INT8 and INT4. Also the onboard RAM allocation has been increased up to 32GB of HBM2E, as well as the TDP, equal to 300W (even in this case, however, there is only one 8-pin PCIe power connector). As expected, the form factor is more full-bodied, moving to the "dual-slot full-length".

We remind you that, awaiting an official presentation by Intel, at the moment this information should be taken as mere rumors. As we reported a few days ago, it seems that the release of DG2 graphics cards may be quite close.

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Alleged details on Intel's Xe HP 'Arctic Sound' leaked, may fail to live up to the hype

Back at Architecture Day 2020, Intel outlined its roadmap (image above) for its Xe (Gen 12) graphics architecture. Among the several variants of the Xe is Xe HP, which will be used to build next-gen Intel server and data center GPUs. Today a report has surfaced (via igor'sLAB) which claims it has the alleged details of those upcoming server GPUs that Intel is designing.

It was first leaked in February 2020 (via Digital Trends) that going forward, Arctic Sound, as well as other such high-performance GPUs from Intel, will feature a tile-based design. We learn today from the new igorLAB's report that each such tile will pack up to 512 graphics execution units (EUs).

For now, at least, we have the alleged details on two such Arctic Sound SKUs, the first being the Arctic Sound 1T (where the 'T' presumably indicates a tile) and Arctic Sound 2T. The 1T allegedly is a single-slot card and has 384 EUs out of the 512 EUs functioning properly, while the dual-slot 2T variant has 480 EUs in each tile working properly. So the 2T has 960 functioning EUs in total.

Image via Digital Trends

In December last year, Raja Koduri, the GPU chief at Intel, had announced that his company was already sampling Xe HP to its potential customers. As such, it's possible that the information igorLAB's received today has leaked out from such a source. In his tweet, Koduri had shown the image of a disassembled Xe HP graphics card alongside its forerunner, a Xe LP-based H3C XG310 quad-GPU.

Below is a table detailing the rumored specifications of Arctic Sound alongside 2020's H3C XG310:

H3C XG310Arctic Sound 1TArctic Sound 2TExecution Units (EUs)4x 96 EUs384 EUs2x 480 EUsMicro-architectureXe LPXe HPXe HPMemory4x 8GB LPDDR4-426616GB HBM2E (2.8G)2x 16GB HBM2E (2.8G)PCIe bus widthPCIe 3.0 x16PCIe 4.0 x16PCIe 4.0 x16TDP150W150W300W

Interestingly, the Digital Trends report had actually mentioned up to four tiles but we are only looking at a maximum of two tiles here. In its report, igor'sLAB speculates that Intel may have given up on bigger designs as the current 2T Arctic Sound allegedly already is a 300W product. And for adding another couple of tiles, the TDP is estimated to reach close to 500W.

So ultimately Arctic Sound may prove to be not much of an upgrade over the current Xe LP-based H3C XG310 offering unless Xe HP gains enormously per TFLOP and per watt over what Xe LP already offers.