The utterly baffling status of Intel's Arc graphics technology just got a bit clearer. Oh, and a whole lot more confusing, too. In a nutshell, the Xe3 iGPU in the new Panther Lake chip definitely isn't based on Celestial, Intel's supposed next-gen graphics architecture. Instead it's a tweak of Xe2, as seen in the Intel Arc B580 desktop GPU and the Lunar Lake laptop chip. We kinda knew that, but now it's absolutely official. But even Intel itself doesn't yet understand how it all relates to the new collab' with Nvidia on PC graphics. Yes, really.
In a new podcast with PCWorld, Intel's long suffering graphics rep Tom Petersen has had another stab at clarifying the confusion that's resulted from Intel's recent Panther Lake tech day and that slide. You know, the one that revealed the iGPU in Panther Lake was indeed Xe3-based, but didn't even mention the Celestial architecture that had hitherto to been synonymous with Xe3 and also indicated that the Xe3 iGPU in Panther Lake would be branded "B" series, which up until now had been aligned with the Xe2 architecture.
