Something to look forward to: Intel is planning to release their first Xe HPG gaming GPU chips this year, but we don’t know when — it could be late in the year, or it could be later this week when Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger takes the stage for his first presentation. Either way, they’ll be something worth watching.
Intel is ramping up the marketing machine for Xe HPG, their upcoming line of high performance gaming GPUs. In a short clip posted to Twitter, they tease a scavenger hunt that’s going to enter phase two on Friday.
In Intel’s teaser, a Xe LP (low power) chip gets hit by a beam and upgraded to a Xe HPG chip. The latter is five times larger, which could be a nod to their designs: Intel’s current LP offerings top out at 96 EUs, while the HPG line is rumored to reach about 512 EUs, five times more and change. It’s usually a bit of a stretch to draw conclusions like that, but this video is full of clues.
At around 17 seconds, the code “79.0731W” appears on the bottom right corner of the platform the chips rest on. As of writing, the code’s unbroken, but there’s speculation that ‘thirty-one weeks’ could be a release date. Four more lines of code appear at the 22 second mark, at the bottom right of the chip. They’ve been decoded already. (If you’d like to decode them yourself, don’t scroll any further.)
Xe HPG microarchitecture teaser=🍬👀 pic.twitter.com/kdzBokBiW4
— Intel Graphics (@IntelGraphics) March 18, 2021
Credit goes to duckofdeath for posting the solution. Each line is a binary number, and the four of them strung together are an IP address: 35.160.237.208. It’s the address for xehpg.intel.com.
Intel’s site says that the “Xe HPG Scavenger Hunt” will launch at 9 am PST on March 26, and that a “secret code” will be required. It could be the first code from the video, or it could be something revealed next week. We’ll keep you updated — if you share the clues you discover.