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Intel’s first discrete GPU for laptops, the Iris Xe Max, will begin shipping next month in three models from Acer, Asus and Dell.
According to Intel, the GPU is coming to Dell’s Inspiron 15 7000 2-in-1 convertible, which will go on sale November 1 in the US The Iris Xe Max will also be available later this year in the Acer Swift 3X and on a specific version of the Asus VivoBook Flip 14, model TP470.
The GPU, also known as DG1, for the company’s first discrete graphics effort, marks Intel’s early foray into the dedicated graphics processor market, which AMD and Nvidia currently dominate. However, the company’s first product is not aimed at PC gamers. It is also not designed for heavy duty 3D rendering.
Instead, the Iris Xe Max is similar to an entry-level laptop GPU, in the vein of Nvidia’s GeForce MX. The company designed the Iris Xe Max to focus on content creation tasks such as video encoding, live streaming, and photo editing.
Iris Xe Max in figures
The product itself is based on Intel’s integrated graphics technology, Iris Xe, which you can now find in some of the company’s 11th-generation Core “Tiger Lake” processors for laptops. The Iris Xe Max takes the same technology, but packages it in a discrete GPU form for a higher GPU clock speed (1.65 GHz) and dedicated video memory (4 GB).
Although the Iris Xe Max GPU is not designed for PC gaming, Intel provided some benchmarks to show how the chip performs against one of Nvidia’s entry-level notebook GPUs, the GeForce MX350. As you can see, the company claims that Iris Xe Max’s discrete GPU technology generally matches or outperforms Nvidia’s in light 1080p games across a selection of titles.
For non-gaming tasks, the Iris Xe Max can also take advantage of some special abilities when paired with Intel’s Tiger Lake Core processors. The company has created a set of features under the general name “Deep Link”, which can simultaneously take advantage of both the GPU in the Iris Xe Max and the integrated graphics on a Tiger Lake chip to accelerate certain workloads, such as video encoding. .
Intel demonstrated this by showing a clip from Deep Link that takes advantage of integrated, discrete GPUs to speed up video conversion in the popular Handbrake app. The company’s benchmarks show that the setup can convert 4K video to 1080p roughly 1.8 times faster than with the GPU acceleration offered by Nvidia’s high-end GeForce RTX 2080 “Turing” GPU.
According to Intel, applications including OBS Studio, Gigapixel AI from Topaz Labs, and XSplit Gamecaster will be able to take advantage of Deep Link, with support for more third-party software coming in the future.
Additionally, Deep Link can better control power delivery and thermals to a laptop’s CPU and GPU to maximize performance on application workloads for additional speed. In Handbrake, in a given example, the boost can equate to a 20% improvement by taking advantage of the additional processing power of the CPU.
Unfortunately, the Deep Link feature is not available for PC games. So you won’t be able to run the equivalent of a mini SLI setup on your laptop.
Interestingly, Intel revealed that the Iris Xe Max doesn’t necessarily represent a better PC game than integrated graphics on a Tiger Lake chip. It depends on the game.
“This is really due to preferences in games about how they like to access memory, or latencies on the PCI Express buses,” said John Webb, Intel’s director of customer graphics marketing.
“So we will introduce software that allows us to make sure the correct game runs on the correct accelerator (GPU) for the best performance,” he added.
Desktop DG1 is also to come (for OEM)
For now, the Iris Xe Max is targeting only a select area of the PC market, but that is expected to change in the near future. During the briefing, Intel also revealed the company’s plans to sell a desktop version of the discrete DG1 GPU in early 2021. However, it will not be able to purchase it as a standalone product. Instead, Intel plans to sell it to PC makers as an add-on card that they can install in their “budget desktop” models.
To tackle the PC gaming market, Intel is preparing the DG2, another graphics processor that the company is already testing in its labs. Expect next year to come too. Intel plans to hire a third-party foundry to build the GPU, amid rumors that TSMC could end up making the product.
