Intel’s Xe is coming—curb your enthusiasm

Unless you’ve been in a coma on Easter island, you know Intel is going to enter the discrete GPU market in 2020 with its highly scalable Xe architecture. Making such an announcement, with or without slides, is the easy part—takes about 30 seconds. The rest is a long, long pipeline. In addition to all the steps one must take from napkin sketch to test silicon, it has to be correctly priced, packaged, boxed, and gotten into the hands of developers. While developers are tinkering with it and trying to tease new tricks out of it that will make their game