Following Intel's announcement that the Xe-HPG DG2 graphics card is "just around the corner," rumors are circulating that DG2 will be coming to laptops; Igor's Labs has been talking to laptop makers and believes that this fall Intel's next-generation hybrid chip Igor's Labs has been talking to laptop makers and believes that a mobile version of DG2 will ship this fall along with a mobile spin on Intel's next generation hybrid chip, Alder Lake.

The lower-powered SKU of GPUs with 4GB of RAM and 196 and 128 graphics execution units (EUs) are expected to ship in late October, while the more powerful variants will ship during the 2021 holiday season.

There appear to be a total of five SKUs in DG2, with the amount of EUs being the main differentiator along with clock speed and amount of GDDR6 RAM. Having a full lineup of choices is a good decision here, as laptop makers prefer to be able to hit many price points within their portfolio.

The largest version of the DG2 is expected to have 512 EU and 16 GB of GDDR6, but we probably won't see that until early 2022. Also, the thermal design power (TDP) of this chip is likely to be 100W. This is quite large for the chip by itself, and does not include memory, so it will not be a GPU that can be squeezed into an ultra-thin and lightweight package.

DG2 is still fairly early days, but it seems as though a lot depends on Intel getting the GPU right this time. Its predecessor, DG1, was surprisingly released to some developers, but no further progress was made.

Whether DG1 simply lacked the raw power to impact the market, or whether there were other problems, we will probably never know, but Intel has a lot to get right this time. But Intel needs to get a lot of things right this time.

One of the potential problems with this move is that many end users associate Intel with less-than-performing integrated graphics that are shoved in with the CPU, assuming DG2 can actually bring serious frame rates to our games, It would take some serious re-education to get people to grasp the idea that DG2 is something different.

Buying the best gaming laptop is going to be more interesting