We’ve been treated to a new leak surrounding Intel’s Arrow Lake processors – next-generation chips expected to arrive in about a year – spilling details about the integrated graphics.
Coelacanth dreama known leak (hat tip to Tom’s hardware), indicated that Arrow Lake’s integrated graphics will be Xe-LPG Plus, which means an improved version of the current generation of Alchemist GPUs. (This corresponds to patches related to the Intel Graphics Compiler).
That will obviously enable better performance than Xe-LPG – the integrated graphics for Meteor Lake, the laptop chips due out in a few weeks – but Intel is also adding something else to the mix: XMX support.
XMX stands for eXtended Matrix eXtensions and this additional feature will be useful in making AI workloads more performant – and also XeSS, more exciting for gamers who rely on integrated graphics.
XeSS is Intel’s take on upscaling, a rival to Nvidia’s DLSS (and AMD’s FSR), so better performance here will be useful for some PC games.
Analysis: Giving gaming laptops a little more power
It should be noted that XeSS will still work fine with the integrated Xe-LPG (Meteor Lake) graphics card, but it won’t work as well. So XMX is not something that is needed for XeSS scaling; it will just be very helpful to obtain the smoothest results.
And when it comes to beefy Arrow Lake CPUs for gaming laptops that remain more affordable by doing away with a dedicated graphics card, these mobile processors will get some extra oomph – a small but useful trick up their sleeve, in short, for supporting games (like DLSS, XeSS requires the game to be coded to support it).
Intel continues to assure us that its future processors all remain on track according to the roadmap, and we should see the debut of Arrow Lake later in 2024. For Intel, it’s really a case of the sooner the better, as AMD could have its next-gen Zen 5 CPUs coming out much sooner next year (including some seriously promising APUs for laptops, it should be noted).