Intel has killed the support for the Cannonlake GPU chips after the processor failed to see the mainstream light as Intel had a huge amount of problems with its first 10nm mobile line. Before Ice Lake, Intel’s first 10nm mobile line was actually the Cannon Lake. Before the launch, there was much hype about the lineup but it eventually only saw one processor hit the market, and only in China.
The only CPU to be released from the Cannonlake lineup was the Intel Core i3-8121U and that too shipped with disabled internal graphics. And now, Intel’s open-source driver developers have finally removed all Gen10-specific code from their Linux OpenGL/Vulkan drivers in Mesa. It is quite odd considering that Intel never shipped a production Cannon Lake CPU with its Gen10 graphics enabled.
Intel’s Cannonlake was a miserable failure for the company in its first try at 10nm architecture. Cannon Lake CPUs never shipped in any major capacity, the only release was in China and the lone Core i3 8121U model had its graphics support disabled when it shipped.
Prior to today, Intel’s Linux graphics drivers had code for Cannon Lake CPUs using 10th Gen iGPUs. But since no Cannon Lake chips were ever released that take advantage of that, Intel’s decision to remove some of the drivers’ code. The code remains for what was shared by Gen9 and prior and similarly code that is also in use for Gen11 or current Gen12/Xe Graphics.
Removing all the Gen10-specific code yields a savings of just under eleven thousand lines within Mesa. The merge clearing out the Gen10 graphics code on Github mentions:
We don’t need [Cannonlake]-only code. This series kills it all with fire.
The merge today places this clean-up for Mesa 20.3 due out before the year’s end. The code was present in Intel driver for 3 years since 2017, back when Intel had planned to release these 10nm chips.
