Progress is all fine and dandy over at Intel’s graphics department, as Intel Fellow Tom Petersen has confirmed via PCWorld’s The Full Nerd Podcast that Team Blue has already halfway on getting Xe3 (codename Celestial) ready to the market.
Xe3’s Hardware ‘Baked’, Now On Software Optimization
Specifically, Petersen says the architecture that follows up on Xe2 (Battlemage) is “pretty much baked”, and the hardware teams are “off on the next thing.” At current stage, Xe3 – as it is referred – is now on the software teams to work on, meaning drivers and optimizations. As a side note, Intel did state in its earlier roadmaps that Celestial will be competing at the ‘Ultra Enthusiast’ segment, potentially taking on NVIDIA’s best.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that Arc Celestial will be launching very soon, given that we’re just days since Intel announced its new Arc B-Series lineup. Chip architecture designs usually goes pretty far ahead in time, which is partly why you see things like roadmaps being shared by chipmaking companies to present what’s coming next.
Still, if anything, this proves that Intel is still taking its GPU business seriously, which will be particularly important as its CPU-making colleagues are going through a pretty rough patch as we speak.
Pokdepinion: Here’s hoping it can be competitive!
