While the latest Intel GPUs have only just landed, the company is already looking ahead to the future. In a new edition of The Full Nerd Podcast, Intel Fellow Tom Petersen said the company’s next-generation Xe3 gaming GPUs are already in progress.
The launch of the Intel Arc Battlemage GPU lineup, which usse the Xe2 architecture, is coming shortly with the release of the Intel Arc B580 later in December, with the B570 following in January. It isn’t anticipated that the B580 and B570 will blow anyone’s socks off, unlike the best graphics cards, but they are expected to offer decent performance for their surprisingly low prices.
Xe3 won’t be around the corner any time soon, however. Petersen boils it down in the interview, stating that there’s still a lot of work to be done on the software side of Xe3. Meanwhile, the hardware team is actively working on the next GPU architecture after that, which is why he refers to it Xe3 as “baked”.
“The way I would like to comment is our IP, that’s kind of called Xe3, which is the one after Xe2. That’s pretty much baked, right? And so the software teams have a lot of work to do on Xe3. The hardware teams are off on the next thing. That’s our cadence, that we need to keep going.”
Xe3 is codenamed Celestial, and Intel had previously announced that it planned to work on it in 2022. The one after this, presumably called Xe4, is codenamed Druid. The future of Xe3 has been a little up in the air, though, as reports earlier in the year indicated that Battlemage’s success would determine whether Intel moves forward with dedicated graphics cards.
Fresher rumors have countered these reports, with one leaker indicating that there was a mix-up between Intel canceling laptop GPUs. However, there’s still a chance that Intel could witness a massive shakeup in the coming months as it looks to replace its recently ousted CEO.
Intel’s track record has been spotty at best in its usual department, processors. Its most recent Core Ultra releases have been hit with performance issues on the gaming front, as we found in our Core Ultra 265K review. While we still rank some of Intel’s roster among the best gaming CPU options, AMD has swept the board with its new Ryzen 7 9800X3D. Battlemage might not be Intel’s saving grace, but it could be the first bit of good news it’s had in months if the cards are received well.