On his Twitter page, Mr. Koduri posted a message accompanied by photographs from the Intel lab in Folsom. In the description of the photo, he said that 9 years ago, when Koduri was still working at Apple, he had already visited this laboratory and got acquainted with the pre-release samples of Intel Haswell processors equipped with Crystal Well Level 4 cache memory and the first generation of integrated Iris Pro Graphics. Since then, many engineers have continued to work at Intel and have acquired gray hair, and the performance of the new graphics accelerator has become 20 times higher than that of Iris Pro in 2012, he said.

Several printed circuit boards can be noted in the photo, as well as two power supplies. One of them is directly connected to the demo board of the Intel DG2 series desktop graphics card. To cool the GPU in its composition, the board is equipped with a large cooler, similar to an air cooling system for the central processor. This approach to cooling test samples is common practice, as it makes it easier to test multiple board variants at once. The second PSU supplies power to the motherboard. The engineering sample of the video card is connected to the motherboard through a PCIe riser. It is not clear which motherboard is used for the test. However, it is similar to the Alder Lake processors’ demo during Intel’s January presentation.

The message from Mr. Koduri does not contain the name of the DG2 graphics, but hints of its presence are in the published photograph. For example, the photo shows a monitor with the 3DMark graphics benchmark window open, including the DirectX XDR benchmark, which tests ray tracing performance.

Intel Xe graphics’ current generation on the Xe-LP architecture used in mobile Tiger Lake processors and discrete graphics cards DG1 and SG1 do not support ray tracing. This fact may hint that the photo shows a sample of exactly one of Intel DG2 video cards’ future models. Intel previously confirmed that these graphics accelerators would receive ray tracing support.

The Intel DG2 graphics family on the Xe-HPG architecture will feature three GPU options offering up to 512 execution units. Video cards based on them will be used in both mobile and desktop segments. The company will use the contractor’s facilities for the production of chips – it is not yet known whose exactly, but most likely TSMC. The level of the technical process for the production of the GPU is also unknown. Most of the rumors, however, lean towards Intel opting for 6nm.