Intel has affixed fixed function units within a Render Slice to support sampler feedback and mesh shading on Alchemist. That's not the only DX12 Ultimate feature on the agenda, either. These units accelerate real-time ray tracing workloads, which Intel has confirmed will be supported with its Alchemist graphics cards. Four Xe-cores combined become a Render Slice, and within each Render Slice resides up to four Ray Tracing Units.
Zooming out some, and things get really interesting for this gaming architecture. Intel plans to use these cores for all manner of AI tasks, but namely it's the acceleration of its Xe Super Sampling (XeSS) (opens in new tab) upscaler that has us excited from a gaming point-of-view. Think of them like Intel's version of Nvidia's Tensor Core. These cores deliver acceleration for AI workloads, such as inference tasks for deep learning. You can spot them on the diagram above marked as XMX, which stands for Xe Matrix Extensions-so long as you generously give Intel the 'X' in 'Extensions'. Those Matrix Engines are extremely interesting, too. This is the fundamental Xe-HPG Xe-core layout. Intel says this was a decision it made to put gaming first for its Alchemist GPUs, and was necessary to build out big gaming graphics cards. The new Xe-core within Alchemist GPUs features 16 Vector Engines and 16 Matrix Engines, which is actually double that found in Xe-HPC. However, the Xe-cores in Xe-HPG are not analogous with what came before, so our best laid plans for possible specifications are just slightly awry. This doesn't entirely change things up, as both Xe-core and EU should share the same essential functionality of grouping together ALUs. The Xe-core is the new fundamental building block for Intel's gaming GPUs (opens in new tab). We had expected a segmentation along the lines of Execution Units (EUs) and memory, although that isn't entirely accurate nowadays as Intel has shifted from the humble EU in favour of the new, all-encompassing Xe-core. Intel Alchemist isn't a single graphics card, it's actually a range of graphics cards. (Image credit: Intel) (opens in new tab) Intel Alchemist specs An Xe-core, the new building block of Alchemist GPUs.
0 kommentar(er)
