Electronics
Intel starts preparation of open source graphics drivers for 14th Gen Core Meteor Lake platform
The development team of Intel’s open source Linux driver is busy perfecting its DG2/Alchemist enablement patch, and the Arc Alchemist ‘Xe-HPG’ integrated graphics card on next-generation Meteor Lake CPUs has now received initial support.
Intel Meteor Lake CPUs now have Intel Graphics Compiler (IGC) support, enabling the upcoming Xe-HPG (Arc Alchemist) TGPUs, but without XMX units and without Int64 support, but with FP64 support.
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Moreover, Intel Meteor Lake CPUs will be the first to adopt the same graphics architecture as the desktop and mobile product lines, and the specific tGPU (Tiled-GPU) on Meteor Lake CPUs is called “Xe_MTL”.
As the successor to Raptor Lake, Meteor Lake is expected to be released in the second half of 2023 or 2024, but Intel has brought very early Linux support to its processors and core graphics.
Under normal circumstances, Intel usually plans related hardware support work a year or more in advance, in order to pass various upstream code reviews before the official release and to ensure stable compatibility with components such as the Linux kernel and Mesa.
At present, Intel’s 14th generation CPU platform uses the same “Xe HPG” GPU architecture as Alchemist’s independent graphics, rather than the “Xe” architecture like the 11th generation Tiger Lake / 12th generation Alder Lake / 13th generation Raptor Lake.
Also, Coelacanth Dream pointed out an interesting thing: Intel Meteor Lake CPUs don’t have DPAS instructions, so they don’t support XMX units.
DPAS (Point Accumulate Add Shrink) instructions are mainly used to perform matrix multiply accumulate operations, and the lack of DPAS instructions may indicate that the Meteor Lake TGPU will lack XMX support, which is mainly designed to provide higher operation and AI speed. This technology is critical to the new XeSS (Ai-Assisted) technology, which will be an AI upgrade similar to NVIDIA’s DLSS technology.
In lieu of DPAS (XMX) units, Intel Meteor Lake CPUs will feature a VPU (Visual Processing Unit), which may provide some form of inference computing power that facilitates XeSS technology.
In addition, FP64 (double precision) computations are partially supported on Tiled-GPUs of Meteor Lake listed in the submitted code. That said, while Intel removed support for FP64 and Int64 from its Gen 11 architecture, it appears to be back on Meteor Lake chips next year.