Intel engineers have been spotted working on Xe3 (codenamed Celestial) enablement in Linux’s grand archive of all mail that affects kernel development. The latest update to the drm-xe-next pull request, dated October 10, 2024, was flagged by Phoronix after it showed several references to Xe3. This probably means that driver development for this GPU architecture has begun for Linux, even though discrete Xe2 Battlemage GPUs are yet to hit the market.
The Xe2 graphics just arrived on the market as iGPUs inside the Intel Core 200V (codenamed Lunar Lake) chips, four years after the launch of the first Intel Xe architecture in 2020 and two years after the arrival of the first generation Intel Arc Alchemist discrete GPUs. The next-generation Battlemage GPUs reportedly began shipping in July, with more details surfacing in August. We expect these GPUs to arrive early next year, thus giving Intel a launch schedule of three to four years between graphics architectures.
