The dark satanic rumour mill has manufactured a hell-on-earth yarn claiming that Intel Nova Lake CPUs will use Xe3 graphics rather than the previously rumoured Xe4 pairing, while still nicking Xe3P media and display engines.
Last year’s chatter suggested a hybrid GPU approach with Xe3 and Xe4, but that seems dead. Leaker Jaykihn says Chipzilla is now leaning on Xe3 and Xe3P instead, with each doing a different job.
For those not in the know, Xe3, better known as ‘Battlemage’, is expected to underpin the graphics tile on Nova Lake. For the media and display engine, Chipzilla will reuse IP from Xe3P, the ‘Celestial’ line.
The display and media block were already tipped for an IP refresh compared with plain Xe3. Even without Xe4 in the mix, the Xe3P media and display engine should bring newer features missing from current Xe3 SoCs.
On the CPU side, Nova Lake-S desktops and Nova Lake-HX laptops are expected to top out at two Xe3 iGPU cores. The rest of the range is said to scale to 12 Xe3 cores, echoing 12Xe Panther Lake parts.
Any tuning to Nova Lake’s Xe3 iGPU tiles sounds likely to be incremental rather than headline-grabbing. The media and display engine is where the real changes should show up.
Chipzilla has already pitched Xe3P as the successor to the Xe3 ‘Arc B-Series’, and it is meant to sit in a new Arc family, likely an Arc C-Series for Celestial. Xe3P is expected in integrated and discrete parts, and the firm has already namechecked it for Crescent Island AI inference GPUs.
