With SIGGRAPH 2018 coming to a close, Intel had a special announcement lined up for enthusiasts of the computer graphics industry. Kicking off its inaugural Twitter account is Intel Graphics, a new social media page for all things GPU-related from Intel. And what better way to celebrate this than with a teaser of its new discrete graphics card.
We will set our graphics free. #SIGGRAPH2018 pic.twitter.com/vAoSe4WgZX
— Intel Graphics (@IntelGraphics) August 15, 2018
Upon closer inspection of the video, we can see that the card seems to sport a single slot option with the PCIe connector. A glimpse of a small metal fan that would cool the card can also be seen.
Intel’s announcement comes in light of NVIDIA’s announcement of its Turing GPU architecture, which provides great potential to real-time ray tracing. This architecture will appear in its future cards such as the the GeForce RTX 2080, so Intel has its work cut out to make a meaningful dent in the market.
In any case, information on Intel’s discrete GPU, codenamed Arctic Sound, is scarce for now. As noted in the teaser video, the new Intel discrete GPU will be Intel’s first foray into the GPU market in 20 years, and targets a 2020 release. The path to 2020 is a long way, though, so there’s plenty of room for us to find out more in the meantime.
In an industry where the market share for GPUs is heavily skewed towards NVIDIA and AMD, it will be interesting to see how Intel means to spark competition as the third competitor. More competition is always good for improvement as a whole, after all.
