Intel Confirms Their Discrete GPU Plans For 2020

We've been expecting Intel to get back into the discrete GPU game especially after Raja Koduri joined the company last year while today Intel tweeted they will be delivering their dGPU in 2020.

The company confirmed, "Intel's first discrete GPU coming in 2020" without revealing any other details. Well, their first discrete GPU since the failed Intel i740 discrete AGP graphics card of two decades ago and their cancelled Larrabee chip of the last decade.

It will certainly be interesting to see what Intel can come up with for discrete graphics offerings in 2020 with Raja Koduri of AMD fame leading that ship.

It's expected that any Intel discrete GPU offering won't be solely limited to consumer 3D/gaming but likely will also be striving for a product as well in the AI/HPC/GPGPU space.

It will certainly be interesting to see their graphics driver support for any dGPU offering. If they go the route of continued open-source Linux graphics driver support, we should hopefully be seeing patches and learning more in 2019 with generally the Open-Source Technology Center beginning to push out patches once clearing legal review and as early as running on simulators and pre-production hardware. On the integrated graphics side they have managed a nice cadence of getting out that initial open-source Linux driver enablement one to two years before the product launches, albeit CPU launch push-backs have helped that recently, and there is already Icelake "Gen 11" graphics currently being brought up on Linux within the kernel and Mesa.