This week Intel announced that it would soon launch a new line of chips that combine an Intel CPU with AMD graphics. But that could just be the beginning of the company’s new approach to graphics.
Intel has been improving its integrated graphics technology for years, and you can now hook up multiple 4K displays and/or play some modern games on a PC with Intel HD graphics. But serious gamers and video or graphic professionals tend to opt for machines that also have discrete graphics cards from NVIDIA or AMD.
Now the company has hired Raja Koduri to be Intel’s new chief architect for a new “Core and Visual Computing Group.”
Koduri used to be head up AMD’s GPU unit… and by used to, I mean up until yesterday. That’s when Koduri announced that he was leaving AMD. A day later, Intel announced that he was joining that company.
Intel says Koduri’s new group will help the company expand into new territories, including “high-end discrete graphics solutions for a broad range of computing segments,” as well as “edge computing solutions,” which AnandTech interprets to mean IoT devices.
The focus on high-end graphics solutions is probably more intriguing for PC enthusiasts, since it means Intel could be prepping solutions that will compete with the latest desktop and mobile graphics solutions from NVIDIA and AMD for folks that need more powerful graphics for gaming, video production, virtual reality, 3D rendering, or cryptocurrency mining, among other things.
Intel had a five year old bug that affected the Z buffer cache in all their integrated graphics products where objects that went off the actively rendered area would reappear and often get in the player’s line of sight. For example, Sonic Adventure 2 HD’s first level had a trolley stuck right in front of the third person camera, making it very hard to finish. This issue was only recently fixed in Skylake after years upon years of countless requests and complaints to fix this issue that made many games off putting or even unplayable. This is also to say nothing of Intel’s i740 and Larrabee discrete GPU projects that were failures. As such, unless Intel rebuilds their graphics group from the ground up, I see nothing but failure written all over this.
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Wow. I did not see that coming
Brad, you missed an important point with this announcement. Linux often struggles with bleeding edge hardware (especially video hardware). You often have a choice of a buggy reverse engineered driver, an unknown closed source driver, or nothing. Intel has been pretty good with Linux support. This might be good news for the Linux community.