Intel has announced a total of four product lines for the GPU Xe:
- Xe-LP (stand-alone integrated graphics from processors Tiger Lake)
- Vehicle-HP (universal GPU consisting of 1, 2 to 4 chipsets) – canceled
- Xe-HPG (gaming GPU expected for desktop and laptops next year)
- Xe-HPC (computing multi-chip solution for supercomputers, eg Aurora)
Xe-HP was one of the first Xe talked about. At first, it was said that it might be a monolith, but it probably only concerned the smallest version, actually composed of one piece of silicon (pictured above). Other models consisted of two pieces of silicon (left and in the opening picture) and four (bottom right).
However, this series has not been heard for a very long time, so probably few will be shocked that Intel gave it up with it. In December 2019 (almost two years ago), Raja Koduri boasted photographs of chips and the team in Bangalore, India, on Twitter.
According to the current Koduri statement, Intel does not anticipate mass production of Xe-HP and states that Xe-HP has evolved into Xe-HPG (for the user market) and Xe-HPC (for the computing segment). Which again clarifies Intel’s original plans a bit more. Xe-HP was supposed to be used for gaming graphics cards as well as computing, but for some reason it was canceled and replaced by two specialized projects. So Xe-HP was probably the original project that aimed to take the architecture from integrated GPUs and build large GPUs usable in both PC and HPC. It is possible that a modern version of the Aurora supercomputer was originally supposed to be created on them. The abolition of Xe-HP and its replacement by Xe-HPC could then explain why Intel announced that Aurora was no longer being prepared as a 1, xEFLOPS project, but as a 2, xEFLOPS project.
The Indian team of Intel responsible for the Xe-HP projects Baap of All and Bahubali of All
Xe-HP aka Baap of All (Indian-English father of everything, father of all, omnipotent…) was supposed to have a successor, known as May 2020, Baahubali of All (superman of everything). Nothing has been heard about this project for more than a year and a half, so it is possible that it was also canceled at an early development stage.
The Xe-HP pieces produced so far were used in the oneAPI devcloud and served as a software development platform for the oneAPI and the Aurora supercomputer.
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