Along with the new architecture of Lunar Lake in as part of Computex 2024 company Intel has announced plans for the development of the third generation of Xe3 graphics. Its launch is scheduled for 2025 along with the next generation of the Panther architecture Lake.
Compared to the current Xe2, which has eight Xe cores, in the new Xe3 architecture, this number will be increased to 12 or even 16, which should provide an even greater performance boost. For comparison, the GPU part of Lunar Lake has been upgraded by 1.5 times comparison with Meteor Lake.
Intel is already working on support for its Xe3 GPU architecture in Linux – even though Xe3, codenamed Celestial, won’t be used in any chips until late in 2025 (at the earliest)
Indeed, Battlemage, Intel’s 2nd-gen Arc graphics, is only just here (in Lunar Lake laptops as the integrated GPU), so it’s very early days for 3rd-gen Celestial.
However, as Phoronix reports, Intel engineers are currently laying the groundwork for enabling Xe3 in the Linux kernel.
Thus far, we don’t know anything about how Xe3 – which will first be used as the integrated graphics in next year’s Panther Lake processors, the successor to Lunar Lake on the laptop side of the PC fence – will improve on its predecessor.
The Linux driver code might eventually give us a clue, but it doesn’t yet. It builds on the existing Xe2 code, and focuses on Xe3 LPM (low-power mode).
What about discrete Celestial?
While this is Xe3 for laptops, the prospect of discrete graphics cards built on Celestial seems far more distant. After all, as we’ve already noted, Battlemage discrete GPUs haven’t even arrived yet, just the implementation of integrated graphics for Intel’s Lunar Lake mobile chips. It may be a while yet before we see standalone Battlemage graphics cards for desktop PCs, but hopefully these might turn up relatively early in 2025, with any luck.
Meanwhile, Intel is certainly forging ahead when it comes to how powerful its integrated graphics are, notably with Lunar Lake, and with Arrow Lake mobile processors also close on the horizon now, and looking pretty nifty, too.
According to early rumors, Xe3-LPG could potentially become a smaller version of the Celestial Xe3-HPG and would be integrated into the Panther Lake architecture. At the same time, at the moment moment it is not known whether Panther Lake will be aimed at desktop or mobile segment. There are no more details about Xe3 yet.
