Targeting rivals Nvidia Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc., Intel Corp. today confirmed in a tweet that it’s entering the market for discrete graphics processing units, with its first products expected in 2020.

The company didn’t provide any details except for the confirmation. Instead, it linked back to an earlier announcement about its hiring of former Advanced Micro Devices Inc. chip designer Raja Koduri, who now serves as its chief architect and senior vice president of its Core and Visual Computing Group.

Discrete GPUs are defined as GPUs that are separate from central processing units such as Intel’s Xeon chips. In other words, they’re a second chip on the system board in addition to the CPU. Discrete GPUs also use their own video random access memory instead of using system RAM for video processing.

Intel faces tough competition in the discrete GPU market, which is dominated by Nvidia and AMD. The chips are primarily targeted at gaming personal computers, but they also have become enormously popular in data centers for artificial intelligence and machine learning workloads, as well as for cryptocurrency mining. With all of these potential markets, it’s easy to see why Intel wants a piece of the action.

And Intel may have an opportunity to make some headway in the market. “This could be Intel’s best chance yet as I believe they will be building a traditional GPU with programmable shaders,” a key technology that calculate image synthesis effects,” said Patrick Moorhead, president and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy.

Back in April, Extreme Tech reported how Intel was working on a new discrete GPU codenamed “Arctic Sound,” saying it would be applied to the above use cases as well as things like self-driving cars. However, rumors abound that Intel has other ideas beyond these applications:

Bonus: Apparently @Rajaontheedge is redefining Arctic Sound (first Intel dGPU), was originally targeted for video streaming apps in data center, but now being split into two: the video streaming stuff and gaming. Apparently wants to “enter the market with a bang.”

— Ashraf Eassa (@TMFChipFool) April 6, 2018

Still, it remains to be seen how Intel will fare against its rivals. Analyst Ryan Shrout of Shrout Research said in a blog post that Intel’s plans to introduce a product by 2020 were “aggressive,” and that it will need to match AMD and Nvidia on performance and efficiency, or at least come within a 20 percent margin. As a result, Shrout said, he’s skeptical of Intel’s prospects.

“Doing that on the first attempt while also building and fostering the necessary software ecosystem and tools around the new hardware, is a tough ask of any company, Silicon Valley juggernaut or not,” Shrout wrote. “Until we see the first options available in 2020 to gauge, Nvidia and AMD have the leadership positions.”

Moorhead added that Intel’s success will depend less on the hardware and more on the ecosystem it can build around it.

Image: Morton Lin/Flickr