A new bit of news coming out of Intel this week as a mysterious tweet may have revealed something interesting. “Jim Keller”, “Raja Koduri” and an unknown processor were spotted on social media by keen-eyed users. The tweets show a glimpse of what many are reporting to be the XE-HP GPUs Intel has been working on for some time. Not much detail to be gleaned here, other than the potential for major progress on the project.
The tease comes from a member of staff at Intel, ostensibly working within the XE-HP GPUs project that may reveal just how much progress has been made on the design and production of the GPU from Intel, the first consumer-facing product in the class from the company. The same source also pointed out that the design phase of a successor consumer GPU is in progress too, hinting at big plans over at intel.
Raja Koduri re-tweeted a celebratory tweet which included the phrase ‘’Baahubali of All’, which according to Wccftech’s Usman Pirzada means “one who has strength in this arms,“ if used as a noun. The original tweet pointed to shows the XE-HP team at work back in 2019, and this new tweet illustrates that Intel may be aiming to take on some new heights with the GPU.
“Battle-fielding and b-floating” appears to be a reference to The bfloat16 floating-point number format. This is routinely used in AI calculations and is a relative measure for processing power with specific workloads. The latter part of this tweet suggests that Intel could be working on machine learning optimizations with the new setup. Some are convinced that the former part is a tacit admission of a gaming focus though. This could be a hopeful and ultimately spurious notion though since there’s only so much that can be drawn from the wording.
It remains to be seen if Intel can really compete with the two titans of the GPU space, AMD and Nvidia. The latter of the two have really been duking it out over these last few months, with AMD and Nvidia trading what many would consider the best GPUs on the market in terms of value. AMD has been clawing back into the CPU game as well. The profitable Ryzen rollouts have allowed them to turn a profit and pay down debt, making them much competitive against Intel.
Intel for their part has relied on the real workhorse of their profit-making, the enterprise space. Server-grade hardware continues to be the place where Intel shines. And even though the XE-HP GPUs from Intel could help make them more of an all-around player in the PC market, it will take a lot more effort from AMD to really dislodge Intel from the top of their game.
