Intel Leak Points To TSMC Being The Choice For Next-Gen GPUs: 5nm Xe-LPG, 4nm Battlemage, 3nm Celestial & Xe2-LPG

Intel seems to be relying entirely on TSMC for the production of its next-gen GPU dies and IPs based on Alchemist, Battlemage & Celestial architectures.

Korean outlet, gamma0burst, has compiled a list of products that have been and are being worked on by Intel engineers. These listings were spotted over at Linkedin and confirm the processes that are going to be used for next-generation GPUs based on the Alchemist, Battlemage, and Celestial chip architectures.

Starting first with the discrete GPU, Intel's Arc Alchemist utilized the TSMC 6nm process node and had three variants, the ACM-G10, ACM-G11, and ACM-G12. The last one has yet to be launched but it may likely appear in the Arc Alchemist refresh which is planned for later this year. Intel's Arc line has received various optimizations over the past months along with superb promotional deals that have made them a very good option for mainstream gamers.

Following Intel Alchemist GPUs will be Battlemage and this is going to be a major launch for 2024. It is expected that the Xe2 Battlemage architecture will utilize TSMC's 4nm process node & its follow-up, and the Xe3 Celestial architecture will utilize TSMC's 3nm process node and launch by 2H 2026 which points to a 2-year GPU cadence.

A recently leaked product plan from an Intel Engineer showed that Battlemage Xe2 and Celestial Xe3 GPUs will come in both HPG and LPG flavors. The Battlemage LPG flavors will be used in the Lunar Lake CPUs while Celestial LPG flavors will be used in the Panther Lake CPUs. The discrete GPUs featured in HPG Arc graphics cards will come sooner than the LPG parts and will target the 75-250W segment.

With discrete GPUs out of the way, we now have the integrated GPUs (iGPUs) which Intel refers to as tGPUs (Tiled GPUs) since they are featured on their own dedicated tile on client processors. The three GPU lineups that are listed in this leak:

This isn't particularly new information since the trio of Xe GPUs and even the fourth one known as Xe4 or Druid are official. What's more interesting is the fact that each of these GPUs has an HPG or High-Performance Graphics and an LPG or Low-Power Graphics part. The first generation of Intel's Xe Alchemist architecture has yet to be incorporated by any consumer CPU but we will see it in the action later this year with the Meteor Lake chips which are expected to carry 128 EUs while Arrow Lake will follow up with to 192 EUs.

The integrated GPUs will be part of the tGPU or Tiled GPU arch which is expected to deliver some big performance gains in the graphics department compared to other traditional integrated chips.

The follow-up to the Xe Alchemist iGPUs will come with Lunar Lake as the Xe2 LPG which will utilize the Battlemage graphics architecture while the Xe3 LPG chips featured on Panther Lake will adopt a brand new Celestial architecture. It looks like Intel has a really good roadmap laid out to utilize their graphics IPs in future Core products. However, some of these products are years away and we have to see how the first generation of Xe GPUs fares against the competition.

The Xe iGPUs and dGPUs will co-exist and Intel is already hard at work on both Xe Battlemage and Celestial GPUs for high-end users in the form of their next-generation Arc graphics card which the company recently talked about over here.