Intel Lunar Lake With Battlemage iGPU Almost 2x Faster Than Arrow Lake With Alchemist+ iGPU In Early Benchmark Leak

Early benchmarks of Intel's upcoming Lunar Lake & Arrow Lake iGPUs featuring the Alchemist+ "Xe-LPG+" and Battlemage "Xe2" GPU architectures have leaked out.

Intel has its hardware and software teams hard at work on the next-generation Battlemage and Celestial GPUs which will be arriving in discrete and integrated variants. Meanwhile, Intel's CPU division is also working with the GPU team to integrate next-gen GPU architectures within their upcoming lineups such as Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake. Both of these CPUs are confirmed to be delivered in the second half of 2024.

We have previously seen entries of Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake CPUs in SiSoftware Sandra but the latest one is an interesting one, particularly since the focus is on the iGPU. The benchmark leak for both chips is based on very early samples so final performance can vary, this is something for you to keep in mind.

Starting with Intel's Arrow Lake CPUs, the Core Ultra Series 2, these chips will house the latest Lion Cove P-Core, Crestmont+Skymont E-Core, and Alchemist+ graphics architecture. Intel's Alchemist+ or Xe-LPG+ is a refined version of the existing Alchemist "Xe-LPG" GPUs and we can expect a range of improvements such as increased clocks.

The CPU spotted is a 64 EU SKU that ran between 1.7 and 2.0 GHz clock speeds. This chip offered a maximum GPU Processing performance of 1075.69 Mpix/s. This is slightly faster than the Intel Meteor Lake 64 Execution Unit chips which were tested last year.

The second chip that has been leaked is the Intel Lunar Lake engineering sample which has 20 cores and a clock speed of 1.0 GHz base and up to 3.91 GHz boost clocks. This chip also has 64 Execution units and was running between 1.75 to 1.85 GHz clock speeds. This chip scored a max GPU Processing performance of 1927.62 Mpix/s. This marks an 80% increase over the Alchemist+ iGPU which is an impressive feat.

Also, something worth sharing is that the Arrow Lake CPUs are listed with a TDP rating between 65W and 125W while the Lunar Lake chip is rated at 17W in this leak. Considering that Lunar Lake CPUs are designed for thin and light laptops, the low TDP makes sense while the Arrow Lake CPUs can be early H-series SKUs for high-end gaming designs. These chips will be competing with AMD Strix Point APUs based on the Zen 5 core architecture which are also coming later this year.

The Lunar Lake iGPU featuring the Battlemage "Xe2" architecture also ends up 26% faster than the Meteor Lake iGPU featuring the Alchemist "Xe" architecture with twice as many cores and it is also ahead of the Arc A310 graphics card with a 25% lead. Considering that the Lunar Lake CPUs don't launch until the end of 2024, this gives us an early taste of just how well the Battlemage GPUs can end up being. Almost a 2x performance increase over Alchemist would be a huge deal and if we get to see similar gains in the desktop discrete graphics card segment, then the next-gen Arc products are going to look awesome.

Once again, it is way too early to base the performance of Battlemage on these benchmarks but Battlemage architecture in iGPUs for future desktop and laptop CPUs would be great for the mass-gaming audiences. Lunar Lake comes to thin and light gaming platforms in late 2024 so expect new details and information to be shared by Intel throughout this year.

News Sources: Momomo_US #1, #2