Here are the full technical specifications for the Iris Xe Max. While the Intel Iris Xe Max gets to its higher frequencies using different libraries than Tiger Lake, “there are a lot of similarities to Tiger Lake,” according to Josh Moss, a member of the graphics product marketing team for Intel’s Client Computing Group. The similarities between the Tiger Lake GPU carry over to the memory: Instead of the GDDR memory you might expect, the Iris Xe Max addresses just 4GB of LPDDR4x memory, the same memory type as Tiger Lake. There are 96 EUs inside the Iris Xe Max, too. The Iris Xe Max GPU is a version of the Tiger Lake-LP GPU, but running at a faster 1.65GHz. Intel’s original Tiger Lake product matrix listed the graphics frequency, which we’ve highlighted in the graphic below.
The Iris Xe Max provides a faster clock speed, plus an odd choice of memory: LPDDR4x.įirst, the numbers. How fast is Intel’s Iris Xe Max graphics?ĭarren McPhee, director of discrete graphics marketing at Intel, calls the Xe-LP GPU inside of Tiger Lake and the Iris Xe Max, “fraternal twins,” in terms of the IP and the specs that they share.
It’s almost like two of the same GPUs working together in concert.but not quite. The company’s pairing of a CPU and discrete GPU began with the short-lived Kaby Lake-G, and the company says it has adapted what it learned there into the Iris Xe Max. The Iris Xe Max takes the integrated graphics already built into Tiger Lake, separates it out into a discrete component, and lets the two work together, facilitated by Deep Link. Intel’s technical strategy raises its own interesting prospects for future laptops. In encoding tasks the gap is more profound: 20 percent to 40 percent, and vastly more in some cases. Frame rates don’t really climb above 45 frames per second, either. Intel’s targeting the Iris Xe Max at what it calls “mobile creators,” and it’s not hard to see why: The company's data showed the Tiger Lake-Iris Xe LP combo slightly topping an Ice Lake-GeForce MX350 notebook, though the advantages are slight. How it does that-through power sharing, and an Intel technology called Deep Link-could make the package of an 11th-gen Core Tiger Lake CPU and an Iris Xe Max GPU a spec to look for in future laptops.Ĭode-named DG1, Intel’s first discrete GPU since 1998’s Intel i740 will appear in mainstream thin-and-light PCs like the Acer Swift 3x, Asus VivoBook Flip TP470, and Dell Inspi2-in-1. The Iris Xe Max faces off against Nvidia’s GeForce MX350 and MX450, both discrete mobile GPUs that split the difference between a gaming-class mobile GPU and the integrated graphics included in mobile Ryzen and Core processors.
Intel claimed Saturday that its new Iris Xe Max graphics can outperform Nvidia’s GeForce MX350 in gaming, and even top a GeForce RTX 2080 in some encoding tasks.