Ahead of its 2014 launch, Intel has started open-sourcing the Linux driver for Broadwell’s GPU. Broadwell is the 14nm die shrink of Intel’s microarchitecture, and while the CPU side of things isn’t expected to change much, Broadwell’s GPU looks like it will be a broad (!) and significant reworking of the Intel HD 5000-series (Iris) GPU found in Haswell. This would seem to confirm that Intel is moving towards a modified tick-tock cadence, where the tick is a die shrink and the introduction a new GPU, and the tock focuses on the CPU side of the equation.
This weekend, Intel pushed 62 patches to the Linux kernel for Broadwell GPU support in Intel’s Linux DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) driver. There’s still a lot of work to be done, but the source code in these patches gives us some insight into what we can expect from the Broadwell GPU. In general terms, Intel’s Ben Widawsky, who works on Intel’s Linux graphics driver efforts, says that “Broadwell graphics bring some of the biggest changes we’ve seen on the execution and memory management side of the GPU… [the changes] dwarf any other silicon iteration during my tenure, and certainly can compete with the likes of the gen3->gen4 changes.”
