We finally have some reliable information about Intel's DG1 discrete graphics card. Slides from a presentation at Argonne National Laboratory (where the Intel Xe supercomputer will be installed in the future) suggest that Intel's first discrete GPU will be for laptop computers.

The slides, found by serial leaker Komachi_Ensaka and used as part of the Exascale Computing Project presentation, suggest that the Xe DG1 GPU will be used only in a mobile form factor for laptops, with low suggesting that it is a power-consuming part, even though it appeared at CES 2020 as a shiny PCIe desktop card (pictured above).

"Surprised" We didn't think you would be; it has long been suspected that the Intel DG1 would be launched as a mobile-only part, but until today there was no concrete information to indicate this. [With 96 Execution Units (EU) and a low-power version of the Intel Xe architecture (Xe-LP), the DG1 was not expected to rock the AMD/Nvidia boat much upon release. At the time, it was good enough to achieve 1080p at 30 fps on Warframe, and no amount of tweaking would have made it a contender for the best graphics card title.

Later this year, however, we may see an attractive Intel Tiger Lake and DG1 combination in the laptop field. The Intel Tiger Lake will be available in the very near future and will feature a 96 EU Gen12 (Intel Xe) integrated GPU as well. Intel is discussing some form of multi-GPU support, but I am quite skeptical as to whether this will be useful for us gamers.

As for high-end Intel Xe GPUs, Raja Koduri, Intel's chief architect, recently confirmed that two high-end forks of the Intel Xe architecture, Xe-HP and Xe-HPC, are tuned to handle big data and deep learning confirmed that the Xe-HPC and Xe-HP are tuned to handle big data and deep learning. That's why Argonne National Laboratory can learn a little more about the Intel Xe architecture, and its next supercomputer, Aurora, will be powered by an Intel Ponte Vecchio GPU connected to a Sapphire Rapids Xeon server chip driven by an Intel Ponte Vecchio GPU connected to a Sapphire Rapids Xeon server chip.

So gamers' hopes of a discrete Intel Xe GPU in 2020 may be dashed. Nevertheless, there is nothing that AMD and Nvidia cannot offer with Radeon and GeForce GPUs.