Intel has published a whitepaper on their new Gen11 processor graphics, providing details about the underlying architecture. The upcoming Sunny Cove processors and Gen11 graphics were unveiled back in December at Intel’s Architecture Day, where Intel had stated that Gen11 was “expected to double the computing performance-per-clock compared to Intel Gen9 graphics”, which is obviously be a massive improvement over their current offerings. Intel promises up 1 TFLOP performance from Gen11, with its 64 EUs (execution units) and other improvements providing up to a 2.67x increase over Gen9 – though Intel does clarity that “there may be different configurations” so we will very likely see the usual segmentation.
“The architecture implements multiple unique clock domains, which have been partitioned as a per-CPU core clock domain, a processor graphics clock domain, and a ring interconnect clock domain. The SoC architecture is designed to be extensible for a range of products and enable efficient wire routing between components within the SoC.”
Gen11 graphics will be based on Intel’s 10nm process, with architectural refinements that promise significant performance-per-watt improvements, according to Intel. Intel also states that memory has been addressed meet the demands from the increased potency of the GPU, with improvements to compression, larger L3 cache size, and increased peak memory bandwidth. All major graphics APIs are supported including DirectX, OpenGL, Vulkan, OpenCL, and Metal – the last of which makes sense as these will very likely be powering the next generation of Apple’s MacBook line.
Intel states that beyond the increases in compute and memory bandwidth, Gen11 will introduce “key new features that enable higher performance by reducing the amount of redundant work”, and list Coarse pixel shading (CPS) and Position Only Shading Tile Based Rendering (PTBR) among them.
For the full details check out this document from Intel (PDF).
