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Intel is already working on its third generation of graphics cards

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Two intel Arc graphics cards on a pink background.
Jacob Roach / Digital Trends
Computex 2024 logo.
This story is part of our coverage of Computex, the world's biggest computing conference.

Intel has officially unveiled its next-generation Lunar Lake mobile chipset in Taiwan ahead of Computex 2024. A refined successor to Meteor Lake, Lunar Lake features a new core architecture, enhanced security, and improved power efficiency as well as Xe2 graphics.

While the new platform focuses on uplifting AI performance and capabilities, the improvements for the GPU seem to be quite captivating. What is even more interesting is that during a session for the updated GPU, a company representative said that Intel is already working on the “next one for Panther Lake generation.”

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Essentially, Team Blue is preparing the third generation of graphics, which is due to launch with Panther Lake sometime in 2025. While it should naturally bring improvement over Xe2, it is too early to predict what kind of improvements and performance gains Intel has in store for us.

The features for Intel's Xe2 graphics architecture.
Intel

What we do know is that the jump from Meteor Lake to Lunar Lake is impressive, offering up to 1.5x graphics performance at the same power. Considering Xe2 features eight Xe cores for the mobile platform, it wouldn’t be surprising to see Intel increasing that to 12 or even 16 next year.

This is not the first time we are hearing about the third-generation, or Xe3, GPU. Last year harukaze5719 on X (previously Twitter), spotted a LinkedIn profile of an Intel GPU engineer mentioning the third-generation Arc GPUs with the codename “Celestial.” It is expected that Panther Lake would integrate the Xe3-LPG architecture, which could potentially be a scaled-down version of the Celestial Xe3-HPG. At the moment we are not sure if Panther Lake will be targeting the desktop or mobile segment, but it is clear that Xe3 is on its way.

It’s hard to say how far along Celestial is at the moment. At the beginning of the year, Intel confirmed that its Xe2 desktop graphics cards, codenamed Battlemage, were all but done on the hardware front already. At this point, the team is refining software as the architecture gets ready for Lunar Lake. Given how Intel normally releases new generations, we should have much more detail on Xe3 at this point next year.

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Kunal Khullar
Kunal Khullar
Computing Writer
Kunal is a Computing writer contributing content around PC hardware, laptops, monitors, and more for Digital Trends. Having…
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