Intel has released a new teaser video at SIGGRAPH 2018 which doubles down on its previous claims of building its own graphics card. We have now seen it in CGI silhouette and know that it's going to be released in 2020. How powerful it will be is anyone's guess, but with such a lead in time, you would hope that it will be able to compete with what Nvidia and AMD have planned for their next-next generation cards in order to be relevant by then.
Intel has always had its foot in the graphics door, including graphics cores on all of its Core chips and even developing a unique co-processing platform known as Larabee in the late '00s which ended up finding use in some supercomputers. The graphics card line it's working on though won't be anything like those: it's going to be a true competitor to AMD and Nvidia.
We will set our graphics free. #SIGGRAPH2018 pic.twitter.com/vAoSe4WgZX
— Intel Graphics (@IntelGraphics) 15 August 2018
Intel famously hired on ex-head of AMD's Radeon Technologies Group, Raja Koduri in 2017. He now heads up the company's own graphics division, bringing his considerable experience at both AMD and Apple to bear on Intel's own developments. Purportedly he has been involved in ramping up the fabrication side of Intel's business, as producing top-tier GPUs is no easy task and could be the main reason that Intel needs to wait another couple of years before we'll get to try out its graphics cards ourselves.
Are you excited for the potential of Intel entering the GPU game? It could help bring much needed competition to Nvidia, which hasn't been truly challenged by AMD in a few generations.