Intel Xe GPU: up to 500W teased, beats Big Navi and GeForce RTX 3080?

Intel is hard at work on its Xe GPU architecture, but a new rumor teases a tile-based architecture approach will be an interesting path as a new report suggests the datacenter variant of Xe could ramp up to 500W of power.

We now have more of an idea on the power consumption across the tile-design approach, where the 1-tile 'DG1' would come in with 96 execution units, 768 cores, and up to 75W TDP -- this is the entry-level Xe GPU. Up from there is the 128 execution unit / 1024 core version with up to 150W of power in the mid-range Xe.

The 2-tile GPU will have the same 128 EUs per tile but since there are two tiles we have 256 total EUs and up to 2048 cores with a TDP of 300W. This will be the high-end gaming card that we should see in 2021 or so, while the 4-tile 'Arctic Sound' is the beast with 4 tiles adding up to a huge 512 EUs, up to 4096 cores, and a huge 400-500W of power -- this is for the datacenter, and not gamers.

We should expect the 2-tile Xe GPU with its up to 300W of TDP to compete with the likes of AMD's upcoming Big Navi GPU, and it will need to offer performance in the vicinity of NVIDIA's current flagship Turing-based GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. But by then NVIDIA will have its Ampere-based GeForce RTX 3080 and GeForce RTX 3070 inside of gamers' PCs that should demolish the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, and most likely anything Intel can pull out of its oven with Xe.