Intel wants to be taken seriously in the discrete gaming GPU market, and its gaming division general manager, Frank Soqui, believes the company traditionally wrapped up in x86 has the capability, expertise, and drive to offer genuine competition in the market dominated by Nvidia and AMD.

Intel’s visual computing team led by ex-Radeon chief Raja Koduri aims to get its first discrete graphics product onto the market by 2020. Rising up from the foundations laid out by its Gen11 integrated graphics venture, the company is hoping to compete in “a broad range of computing segments”, including gaming, with its high-end discrete GPU: Intel Xe.

“I would say the driving force behind doing the discrete graphics card is probably the driving force behind everything we do right now,” Soqui says to PCGamesN at IEM (Intel Extreme Masters) Katowice – the CS:GO major championship run by ESL. “We’re probably the largest silicone manufacture on the planet, and we make silicone for everything. We make CPUs, we make integrated graphics, we make memory, storage, so why not discrete graphics cards?”