Intel has added initial support for its upcoming 15th Gen Arrow Lake processors to the Intel Graphics Compiler. Like Meteor Lake, Arrow Lake will feature a chiplet design with a disaggregated iGPU tile fabbed on TSMC’s N4 (4nm) or N3 (3nm) process node.
The 15th Gen family will leverage the Xe-LPG Plus architecture, a tweaked version of the Xe-LPG GPUs used by Meteor Lake. The Xe-LPG graphics architecture combines the features of Xe-LP and Xe-HPG to provide a low-power architecture for mild gaming with most DX12 capabilities.
The primary difference between the Xe-LPG GPU on Meteor Lake and the Xe-LPG Plus on 15th Gen Arrow Lake is but one. The former incorporates most components of Xe-HPG except the XMX units, and for good reason. The matrix units take up significant die space while offering minimal benefits beyond accelerated XeSS support on a consumer notebook.
The Xe-LPG Plus iGPU on Arrow Lake will be a miniature implementation of Intel’s next-gen integrated graphics with only a few Xe Cores. Regardless, XMX units will be a notable advantage for mobility platforms where every frame and watt count.
Intel’s Xe-LPG iGPUs also feature dedicated ray-tracing hardware capable of BVH traversal, ray/box intersection testing, and thread sorting to reduce divergence and improve utilization. It wouldn’t be inaccurate to say that LPG’s RT Cores are on par with AMD’s RDNA 3 Ray Accelerators, at least in terms of features.
