Intel Ice Lake Gen11 iGPU gets DisplayPort 1.4a and DSC support

Posted on Wednesday, October 03 2018 @ 13:53 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
intc logo
TechPowerUp published over a dozen of slides that reveal some of the new features of the Gen11 integrated graphics architecture from Intel. This will be the first major update in four years, as Intel hasn't moved on from Gen 9.5 yet, which was introduced with Skylake.

The Gen11 architecture will make its debut with Ice Lake and features DisplayPort 1.4a as well as VESA DSC (display stream compression). This will enable systems with the future Ice Lake CPUs to support display resolutions of up to 5K (5120 x 2880 pixel) with 120Hz refresh rate, or 8K at 60Hz.

As TPU points out, this big increase is needed to support the latest screens:
Without DSC, 5K-120 Hz requires 42.4 Gbps of bandwidth (not counting interconnect and protocol overheads), which even DisplayPort with HBR3 cannot provide, as it caps out at 32.4 Gbps. DSC offers "visually lossless" compression of the 5K-120 display stream down to roughly 14 Gbps, which can be comfortably handled by DisplayPort 1.4a. 8K (8192 x 4320 pixels) at 60 Hz also becomes possible. Merely supporting these new high resolutions doesn't imply Gen11 iGPUs can game at those resolutions. Support for them is necessitated by rapid increases in resolutions (pixel densities) and refresh-rates of high-end notebooks and ultra-portable devices.
INTC Gen11  resolution slide

When you can expect Ice Lake remains a bit of a mystery. This architecture is intended for Intel's 10nm process, which is suffering from multi-year delays. At the moment, it looks like Ice Lake is a 2020 part.


About the Author

Thomas De Maesschalck

Thomas has been messing with computer since early childhood and firmly believes the Internet is the best thing since sliced bread. Enjoys playing with new tech, is fascinated by science, and passionate about financial markets. When not behind a computer, he can be found with running shoes on or lifting heavy weights in the weight room.



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