Intel Arrow Lake: Xe-LPG Plus with XMX for faster XeSS

According to the latest information from Coelacanth-Dream, the Arrow Lake CPUs from Intel will probably be equipped with an Arc Xe-LPG GPU, which is a slightly improved version of the one already found on the Meteor Lake CPUs. However, this GPU is said to offer improved AI acceleration, which is achieved by the addition of XMX units. Due to this change, Intel will rename the integrated GPU to Xe-LPG Plus, while the version for Meteor Lake will simply be referred to as Xe-LPG.

In the latest IGC patch, the Intel Arrow Lake Arc “Xe-LPG Plus” GPU has been added. It turns out that both Meteor Lake and Arrow Lake GPUs retain most of the same functionality, but at least some segments have been added or improved. One of these innovations are the new XMX units (Xe Matrix Extensions), which can be found on the dedicated graphics chips. However, to save space on the Meteor Lake die, Intel has removed XMX units from the Xe-LPG render slices and switched to the traditional DP4a instructions.

These instructions continue to do an outstanding job of accelerating and supporting XeSS. XeSS is Intel’s upscaling technology that was recently shown in a demo with Meteor Lake where up to a 2x performance boost was achieved in games. The existence of XMX suggests that one could expect even better performance when XeSS is enabled. In addition, improved image quality is offered on the next generation Arrow Lake CPUs. It is still unclear whether the Arc Xe-LPG Plus GPUs will be integrated into Arrow Lake across the board or remain limited to certain high-end gaming SKUs. However, it will definitely be exciting to see improved graphics capabilities for Intel client chips in the future.

The upcoming Intel Arrow Lake Arc Xe-LPG Plus GPU will be based on the Alchemist architecture, but on a TSMC 3nm process node instead of the current 5nm node. It will be the last integrated GPU with this architecture before Intel switches to the more powerful Xe2 GPU called Battlemage for Lunar Lake and eventually to the Xe3 Celestial for future client chips.

Source: Coelacanth-Dream