Nvidia and AMD strained? Intel unveils Iris Xe discrete graphics for desktops

Intel has finally made official what it has been talking about a lot earlier: the company has released a discrete Iris Xe card for desktop computers. At the same time, the company showed partner versions of it – produced by Colorful and Asus. In the first case, a traditional cooling system with two fans is used, in the second, a more appropriate completely passive and silent cooling system is used.

Why is a passive system preferable? Because in terms of performance, such a discrete video card is likely to be inferior to the GPU Iris Xe Max integrated into mobile processors (desktop Iris Xe and mobile Iris Xe Max are two versions of the 10nm DG1 graphics processor). It will yield because the Iris Xe has 80 execution units, while the mobile Iris Xe Max has 96. Accordingly, the number of stream processors is different: 640 versus 768 in the mobile version. Rumor has it that 16 execution units in Iris Xe are locked, but it is too early to say so. Iris Xe received 4 GB of LPDDR4X memory with a 128-bit bus. From the list of characteristics it follows that such a video card is not at all intended for games.

This is the first reason why someone with the slightest expectation of gaming would not buy the Intel Iris Xe. The second reason is that the video card is unlikely to go to retail. According to the source, the Iris Xe are intended for use in computers that will be sold assembled. And there are even a number of conditions here!

Iris Xe will be installed in PCs with a motherboard based on the Intel B460, H410, B365 or H310C chipset and a 9th or 10th generation Core processor (Coffee Lake-S or Comet Lake-S, respectively). Moreover, these motherboards will have a special BIOS version that will support Iris Xe. So on other systems with a standard BIOS version, Iris Xe will not work, although enthusiasts may have a different opinion on this matter.