Intel preps new graphics drivers
‘Device-local memory’ likely heralds arrival of a new generation of discrete graphics cards from the mighty chip giant.
released in February, a sizeable series of patches for Intel’s i915 kernel driver paves the way for new graphics hardware, the hardware giant has confirmed. The code enables support for memory regions and local memory, which aren’t relevant to current Intel hardware.
Intel’s graphics offerings have hitherto been strictly integrated affairs, with some last year even featuring Radeon RX graphics from rivals AMD. Intel’s ill-fated Larrabee, an ambitious initiative to develop a GPU with an x86 instruction set, never fructified. But that was a decade ago, so you might wonder what is different now.
The answer, or an answer, is machine learning and the wider area of general-purpose GPU computing. Intel’s current graphics performance is poor compared to even entrylevel offerings from AMD and Nvidia. This, it hopes, will change in future, and by competing not just on gaming performance but in data centres, enterprise settings, rendering farms and of course traditional workstation graphics, these hopes could be realised. We won’t see any of the new Xe-branded hardware until 2020, but with Intel’s recent high-profile appointments including Raja Koduri, Jim Keller and Chris Hook, it certainly has the resources to come up with something exciting. Its approach to graphics should be applauded; while Linux users used to have to fight with obfuscated or closed source drivers from AMD (which has since changed its outlook) and Nvidia (which hasn’t), Intel always provided and supported open source code. And it’s already the world’s largest GPU manufacturer…