THE processors Meteor Lake will be entitled to a brand new graphics engine. For a high-level iGPU solution?
The first hours of Intel Innovation 2023 are already an opportunity to learn a lot about the new features of the American company, which intends to score points against its main competitors.
Meteor Lake (yes, again and again) will benefit from a large overhaul of its graphics subsystem with the integration of the new Xe-LPG architecture, which should notably boost performance, even at very low consumption (10 watts ).
Some decoding, but no AV1 encoding
Xe-LPG is at the heart of the design of a Meteor Lake processor and constitutes the entire graphics part, one of the four key elements of the chip, in addition to being found, thanks to the media and display engine, within the SoC .
©Intel
This media engine will be important as a Meteor Lake processor must be able to do without a graphics card, especially in the thinnest and lightest laptops. Unsurprisingly, it is capable of decoding all the most common formats (AVC, VP9, HEVC and AV1), but note that for decoding, AV1 is not in the game.
The display engine, for its part, provides support for 8K definition up to 60 Hz, or a maximum of 4 4K streams, always at 60 Hz. Of course, HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort 2.1 20G/eDP 1.4 are in the game.
Ray tracing in the spotlight
More generally, Xe-LPG should mark many advances compared to Xe-LG used previously. In a few words, Intel emphasizes “ higher frequencies, a more muscular configuration and better energy efficiency “.
In fact, this results in a lower operating voltage and higher frequencies reached by the graphics cores. These cores will also have the possibility of being more numerous, with a maximum of 8 Xe cores within a chip for a total of 128 Vector Engines, 2 Geometry Pipelines, 8 Samplers, 4 Pixel Backends and, above all, the addition of 8 units reserved for ray tracing.
©Intel
This distribution of “tasks” does not necessarily mean something to you, so it is useful to remember that this is more or less the same as what we find on the ACM-G11 GPU which powers the ARC A380 graphics cards. These are certainly modest cards, but dedicated cards nonetheless, while we are talking here about iGPU for Meteor Lake. In addition, the integration of the 8 units dedicated to ray tracing could provide a real boost.
©Intel
Finally, Intel dwells a little on the performance of its Xe-LPG architecture, but mainly compares it to Xe-LP, and not necessarily in a very clear way for us. Note, however, the publication of slides devoted to endurance in video games. Proof that Intel takes the autonomy guaranteed by its Meteor Lake CPUs very seriously, which we can’t wait to see in action and whose release has therefore just been scheduled for December 14.
Source: Intel
2