Company Intel has launched the first generation of Intel Arc cards on the market and has gained a lot of valuable experience in the process. In an interview with HardwareLUXX, Intel’s Tom Petersen noted that they took a very unfortunate approach that led to many of the problems we’ve seen. The main problem was that Intel was developing four different chip variants, namely the economical Xe-LP, the powerful Xe-HP, the Xe-HPC computing cards and the Xe-HPG graphics cards. Such fragmentation of development into many branches brought delays, problematic drivers, high development costs and various cancellations of some projects. He does not want to repeat this with the development of the next generation of Intel Arc Battlemage and believes that it will be significantly simpler.
On the one hand, there is already something to build on, on the other hand, the whole solution will be divided into only two, the economical Xe-LPG series and the powerful Xe-HPG. This should allow Intel to simplify development, better manage intellectual property issues and bring a more scalable solution. E.g. driver development will now not be split into each segment separately, where completely different solutions were available, but the basis should be the same for all versions. We should see the Xe-LPG variant for the first time in Intel Meteor Lake processors in the form of a tiled GPU, Xe-HPG is expected to appear in early 2024. The third generation of Xe3 will be called Celestial, and the fourth will be called Druid.
