Intel's GPU (and related) efforts appear to be speeding up as the company has broken ground on a brand new graphics, hardware, and software research center in India. The new research center will have over 1500 employees, to begin with, and will have room to grow eventually. Since the company has a lot of GPU related leadership situated in Banglore, the company believes it will help level up their race-to-market.
Intel opens R&D center in India, focused on Graphics, hardware, and software
The information was disseminated through twitter (what isn't these days) and the graphics boss Raja Koduri revealed that this is going to be one of the major development centers. Since Raja deals with graphics and has ties to India, it makes sense that the research center would be situated there - not to mention that talent is relatively cheaper to acquire in developing countries. Essentially, this means that Intel will be able to hit the ground running in R&D when it comes to graphics and if it pans out could eventually expand to rival the R&D spend of the giant that is NVIDIA.
Will be a major development centre...ideal as our Bangalore leadership is only one hop away and can help grow it to cover our Graphics and throughput computing hardware and software ambitions https://t.co/O5y8y0YkNm
— Raja Koduri (@Rajaontheedge) November 12, 2018
If NVIDIA has taught us one thing - it is that R&D is the key between disrupting and getting disrupted. For these silicon companies, almost no penny that you put into R&D can be considered wasted and is absolutely essential to stay in the race of bleeding edge processors.
Word on the grapevine about Intel's dedicated GPUs
Intel is planning on entering the dedicated graphics market with a bang sometime in 2020-2021 and the codename to look out for is Arctic Sound and Jupiter Sound. These are the codenames of Intel’s upcoming discrete GPUs. Arctic Sound will be the first iteration of Intel discrete GPU and will constitute 12th Generation graphics.
Arctic Sound, as it transpires will have a gaming variant as well - in the form of a dedicated graphics card. Which means we are going to be seeing this in the mainstream in a few years. The tentative timeline given for this product is by 2020 and knowing how roadmaps work could even be further off. According to the grapevine, the Arctic Sound discrete GPU will be an MCM module with multiple dies connected via EMIB and will go head to head against Intel and AMD’s offering.
The successor to Arctic Sound will be Jupiter Sound which will constitute the 13th generation of Intel graphics. Timeline for this product is as yet unknown but we shouldn’t expect it to exist on anything except paper right now. Depending on how successful Arctic Sound is, we should see a big leap in performance going forward from the 1st generation of Intel discrete graphics (Arctic Sound). This isn’t the first time Intel has ventured into the discrete graphics section (Larabee) but this is the first time they have done so with this much ambition, talent, gusto and frankly- the requisite technical level.
