Intel’s next-gen Xe3P Celestial GPUs may be based on Xe3P and Intel lithography

ARC Celestial may be a game-changing GPU architecture for Intel

At CES, Intel committed itself to the discrete GPU market. Intel’s ARC series of discrete GPUs won’t end with Battlemage. In fact, Intel claims that their Xe3 silicon is already “baked.” Now, it looks like Intel will be using Xe3P to build their next-generation Celestial GPUs, not Xe3, as uncovered by @OneRaichu on Twitter/X (via Videocardz).

Intel has already confirmed that their Panther Lake CPUs will be launching this year with Xe3 graphics. This suggests that Intel are building two variants of 3rd generation Xe graphics architecture. These are Xe3 and Xe3P. The “P” in Xe3 likely stands for “Performance.”

Intel’s Xe3P-based ARC Celestial GPUs could be game-changing for Intel. Not only does a new architecture give Intel space to greatly improve the performance of its GPUs, Xe3P could also transition Intel’s discrete GPUs to an Intel lithography node for the first time. Xe3P could use Intel’s 18A lithography node. That would greatly improve the profitability of Intel’s discrete GPUs, as all of them have been made by TSMC so far.

How will Xe3P differ from Xe3? Who knows. If Xe3 is used for Panther Lake, it is possible that Xe3P simply has a higher power target and some compute-focused enhancements for the high-performance GPU market. However, it is also possible that Xe3P is more advanced than Xe3 in some ways. After all, we expect Panther Lake CPUs with Xe3 graphics to launch before Xe3-based desktop GPUs.

You can join the discussion on Intel’s Celestial dGPUs being based on Xe3P on the OC3D Forums.