Intel's GPU answer to Nvidia Geforce and AMD Radeon surfaces - but you won't be able to buy it

The as-yet-unreleased Intel Xe HP NEO graphics chip has shown up on a Geekbench benchmark, and its scores don’t paint a rosy picture.

In the benchmarks posted by serial hardware leaker Tum_Apisak, the Intel Xe HP NEO scores 25475 points in the OpenCL test. To put it in perspective, the score is about 2.5 times lower than that of the GeForce RTX 2060 released last year.

That said, TechRadar Pro cannot verify the authenticity of the benchmark.

Intel's Xe HP is the upcoming family of datacenter GPUs that’s architecturally similar to AMD CCX on its Ryzen based platforms. It’ll go head-to-head with Nvidia's A100 datacenter GPUs. The Xe GPUs will also include tensor cores for AI intensive applications and HBM2e memory.

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Early bird

The benchmark is done on a machine running Ubuntu 20.04 with about 128 GB of RAM, with the benchmarked machine running a single tile Xe HP chip with 512 compute units, and is only shown to be operating at 1.15GHz. This is surprising because an Xe HP was clocked at 1.3 GHz earlier this year at the Intel Architecture Day 2020.

Even if the score is genuine, and we have our doubts, it seems to have been conducted on an early prototype of the chip, and would be missing all of the recent refinements and optimizations.

As Tom’s Hardware notes, at best, the XE HP’s low score only highlights the disconnect between synthetic benchmarks like Geekbench and real-world performance. And at worst, all they show is that an early version of the Intel Xe has managed to slip into the wild.