Intel’s Meteor Lake CPUs May Arrive With Ray Tracing Hardware
Korean high-tech treasure hunters coelacanth dream (opens in new tab) We’ve dug up some interesting information about the integrated GPU that comes with Intel’s Meteor Lake processors. From the sighting of a new code patch for the Intel Graphics Compiler (IGC), a shady tech poster revealed that Meteor Lake iGPUs could support ray tracing in hardware. Unfortunately, a potential drawback is that the iGPU may not have an Intel XMX (Xe Matrix eXtension) unit.
Codenamed Raptor Lake (RPL), Intel’s 13th Generation Core processors are the next product and are coming soon. However, we believe that in 2023, Intel’s 14th Gen Core processors, dubbed Meteor Lake (MTL), will make quite a stir with some bold and advanced steps. Regular readers will know that the core processor transition from 13th to 14th generation is Intel 7 to Intel 4. That’s not all, though, as we’ll see Intel’s first distributed design with his TSMC N3 tile under the heatspreader. It’s the GPU part of the chip, and thanks to research by coelacanth dreamers, a clearer picture of this iGPU is becoming more and more apparent.
In July of this year, Coelacanth’s Dream discovered some Intel Linux patches. This suggested that MTL’s graphic style would feature her Xe-HPG/Xe-LPG architecture and up to 128 EUs produced by his TSMC using the N3 manufacturing process. .now we New Code Patch for Intel Graphics Compiler (opens in new tab)(IGC), we can make some more inferences about GPU tiles.
Perhaps most interesting is a patch indicator that hints that Meteor Lake’s iGPU will have ray tracing hardware. Intel LGA1700 CPUs such as Alder Lake and Raptor Lake come with up to 96 Xe-LP EUs. However, Meteor Lake would feature a Xe-HPG architecture GPU, which has a lot in common with Alchemist / DG2 discrete graphics cards and could feature up to 128 or 192 of these EUs. Ray tracing support feature is covered in IGC and ray tracing support is enabled when iGFX_meteorlake is detected. Additionally, Meteor Lake appears to support hardware ray tracing in all apps that help Alchemist/DG2 or Ponte Vecchio functionality.
Adding ray tracing support to the iGPU would be a welcome move from Intel, but it would only catch up with AMD, which has been selling Ryzen 6000 (Rembrandt) processors with RDNA2 iGPUs through most of 2022.
Moving on to the issue of Meteor Lake’s iGPU architecture, which lacks XMX units. An IGC patch confirms that the MTL does not support DPAS (Dot Product Accumulate Systolic) instructions that rely on the XMX unit. This suggests that the iGPU does not have his XMX unit, which could negatively affect Intel XeSS acceleration, for example. On desktop, the Xe-core features 16 XMX units capable of performing 128 FP16/BF16, 256 INT8, or 512 INT4/INT2 operations per clock. XeSS also accelerates, but this scaling technique has a fallback to his DP4a instruction mode.
Finally, it’s worth remembering that Meteor Lake CPUs are a very significant change for Intel and they may face early issues. About two weeks ago we reported that production of his 3nm GPU tiles for Meteor Lake at TSMC may have been postponed. It’s possible that Intel has decided to switch to his new N3E process, but it’s hard to tell from the sources if this is actually the case or if there’s something wrong.