Intel's next-gen Xe2 'Battlemage' GPU: 50% perf uplift, Lunar Lake first, discrete GPUs later

Intel has officially unveiled its next-gen Xe2 GPU which will drop into Lunar Lake CPUs later this year, while next-gen Arc "Battlemage" discrete GPUs will arrive after.

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During the Intel Tech Tour 2024 event, Intel fellow and ex-NVIDIA staffer Tom Peterson talked all things next-gen Xe2 GPU architecture. Intel is making things easier to understand with its next-gen GPU architecture, where instead of using LP, LPG, HP, and HPG naming schemes (which can be confusing for people), Intel is calling its next-gen GPU lineup Xe2. Internally, the company will still use codenames, but they won't be used on the client side moving forward.

Intel has designed its next-gen Xe2 GPU from the ground up, with higher utilization, improved work distribution, and less software overhead. There are multiple (major) problems that were inside of Xe "Alchemist" GPUs, which are now fixed in Xe2. Intel has promised some major IP performance efficiency for Xe2, with performance gains of up to 12.5x in particular use cases.

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Intel says its next-gen Xe2 architecture -- just like Xe -- is highly scalable, so we will see Xe2 GPUs inside of low-power mobile chips including Intel's next-gen Lunar Lake (which you can read more about below) right up to higher-end Arc "Battlemage" discrete graphics cards in the future.

Intel's next-gen Lunar Lake Xe2 GPU features 8 Xe2 cores with each Xe2 core featuring 8 XMX and 8 Vector units, a Load/Store unit, a Thread Sorting Unit, and a dedicated L1/L$ cache. Each of the four Xe2 cores makes a single Render Slice.

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This culminates in a huge performance gain over the Xe GPU inside of Meteor Lake, with Intel saying Xe2 GPUs will feature 50% higher performance at ISO, and significantly lower power consumption while maintaining the same performance.

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The XMX block is of significance, with 67 peak INT8 TOPS adding to the overall AI power of Lunar Lake CPUs, with the chip itself providing 120 platform TOPS that includes 48 TOPS from the NPU4 on Lunar Lake, and 5 TOPS from the CPU itself.

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The Xe2 Display Engine comes with 3 x Display Pipes with up to 8K60 HDR support, up to 3 x 4K60 HDR support, up to 1080p 360Hz and 1440p 360Hz support. The Display Engine supports HDMI 2.1, DisplayPort 2.1, and the new eDP 1.5 standard.

We will have Intel's next-gen Lunar Lake CPUs launching later this year inside of new low-power laptops, while desktop-based Arc "Battlemage" Xe2-based graphics cards will arrive after. Let's hope they're not too far away, because NVIDIA is preparing to unleash its GeForce RTX 50 series "Blackwell" graphics cards, and already leads the market with its RTX 40 series "Ada Lovelace" GPUs.

Intel isn't going to take the Xe2 GPU battle to the high-end side of the market, but in new laptops and mid-to-high-end graphics cards will be up for grabs by Xe2.