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Intel may have the bulk of the desktop and laptop CPU market, at least for now, but it has struggled to carve a niche in the graphics industry. It has always been touting its Iris graphics technologies and while they have definitely improved over the years, they still fall short of those with a discrete graphics card, especially on desktops. Laptops, on the other hand, offer an opportunity for Intel to break through and that’s exactly what its new discrete Iris Xe MAX GPUs promise for thin and light laptops.
Intel’s argument for pushing its own discrete graphics, beyond a show of technical prowess, is that laptop CPUs are rarely optimized when paired with a third-party solution, like that from NVIDIA or AMD. That means that by being the one that makes both CPUs and GPUs, Intel can squeeze all the performance it can and actually outperform a combination of Intel CPUs and third-party GPUs.
That’s mainly due to a combination of PCIe Gen 4 and Intel’s Deep Link technology. The latter offers a single software framework for the CPU and GPU processing engines to maximize their performance. As always, the additional power is used to drive AI-related operations such as additive AI for inference and rendering for both the discrete Iris Xe MAX GPU and the Iris Xe chip embedded in an 11th Gen Intel Core processor. .
A note on Intel’s first discrete laptop GPU push is that it is primarily aimed at creatives, where AI-based authoring and media encoding are more important than fast real-time graphics rendering. That said, Intel also announces that the Iris Xe MAX also improves gaming performance, at least for 1080p resolutions, through the Game Sharpening and Instant Game Tuning functions.
Discrete Intel Iris Xe MAX graphics, despite being discrete, are closely tied to Intel’s recently announced 11th generation processors, whose integrated graphics also use the same Xe-LP graphics architecture. They are available now on the Acer Swift 3, Asus Vivobook Flip TP470, and Dell Inspiron 15 7000 2-in-1. Unsurprisingly, Intel also plans to spread its wings soon to HPCs and eventually to desktops in the first half of 2021.
