DECEMBER 2020 PCWorld 15the difference between a gaming-class
mobile GPU and the integrated graphics
included in mobile Ryzen and Core
processors.
Intel’s targeting the Iris Xe Max at what it
calls “mobile creators,” and it’s not hard to
see why: The firm’s data showed the Tiger
Lake-Iris Xe LP combo slightly topping an Ice
Lake-GeForce MX350 notebook, though the
advantages are slight. Frame rates don’t really
climb above 45 frames per second, either. In
encoding tasks the gap is more profound: 20
percent to 40 percent, and vastly more in
some cases.
Intel’s technical strategy raises its own
interesting prospects for future laptops. The
company’s pairing of a CPU and discrete GPU
began with the short-lived Kaby Lake-G (go.
pcworld.com/lakg), 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. It’s almost like two of the same
GPUs working together in concert...but not
quite.HOW FAST IS INTEL’S IRIS XE
MAX GRAPHICS?
Darren 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. The Iris Xe Max provides a faster
clock speed, plus an odd choice of memory:Intel Iris Xe Max (Acer Swift 3x with Core i7-1165G7/Iris Xe Max) is the blue bar above, versus Nvidia’s
GeForce MX350 (running alongside a Core i7-1065G7), the green bar above.
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