Intel’s already working on its 3rd-gen Celestial GPUs – but we’re still waiting for discrete 2nd-gen Battlemage graphics cards

October 11

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Intel is already working on support for its Xe3 GPU architecture in Linux – even though Xe3, codenamed Celestial, won’t be used in any chips until late in 2025 (at the earliest)

Indeed, Battlemage, Intel’s 2nd-gen Arc graphics, is only just here (in Lunar Lake laptops as the integrated GPU), so it’s very early days for 3rd-gen Celestial.

However, as Phoronix reports, Intel engineers are currently laying the groundwork for enabling Xe3 in the Linux kernel.

Thus far, we don’t know anything about how Xe3 – which will first be used as the integrated graphics in next year’s Panther Lake processors, the successor to Lunar Lake on the laptop side of the PC fence – will improve on its predecessor.

The Linux driver code might eventually give us a clue, but it doesn’t yet. It builds on the existing Xe2 code, and focuses on Xe3 LPM (low-power mode).

What about discrete Celestial?

While this is Xe3 for laptops, the prospect of discrete graphics cards built on Celestial seems far more distant. After all, as we’ve already noted, Battlemage discrete GPUs haven’t even arrived yet, just the implementation of integrated graphics for Intel’s Lunar Lake mobile chips. It may be a while yet before we see standalone Battlemage graphics cards for desktop PCs, but hopefully these might turn up relatively early in 2025, with any luck.

Meanwhile, Intel is certainly forging ahead when it comes to how powerful its integrated graphics are, notably with Lunar Lake, and with Arrow Lake mobile processors also close on the horizon now, and looking pretty nifty, too.