The Battle mage is coming. At least that's what Intel is saying at an event dedicated to its new mobile processor, Lunar Lake. These new mobile chips give a good idea of what to expect with Intel's second—generation graphics card — Lunar Lake and the upcoming Battlemage graphics

which is called Xe2 - with a little floating 'e' that our website doesn't display correctly. This new architecture is found across the Intel product stack and doesn't mean either Xe-HPG, Xe-LPG, or its nomenclature - it's Xe2 that's all the way down.

The new Lunar Lake processor appears on the left side of the photo above. On the right is the first official image of the upcoming Battlemage GPU.

"What I'm confirming to you today is that the Xe2 architecture will be used in both," Intel graphics spokeswoman Tom Petersen says during a briefing for Lunar Lake graphics.

The Xe2GPU is divided into render slices, each render slice is divided into 4 Xe cores, and each Xe core is divided into 8 vector engines. 

Lunar Lake comes with 8 Xe cores. This is not so much for gaming GPUs, but to better understand what to expect with a discrete card, just look at the Arc A770. It comes with 32. So think of all the new additions to the Xe2 architecture listed here, but multiply a good few times and you have a rough estimate of the potential of Battlemage

The new Xe2 architecture is built to be so scalable, says Petersen.

Xe2's Xe-core has been improved for higher performance, better utilization, and game compatibility. That last point is especially important and is out of Intel's previous form.

"Most of the time, you'll see the game running out of the box right away," Petersen says.

I hope that is the case. The behavior that could best be described as clunky, or inconsistent, was a thorn on the side of Alchemist, Intel's first discrete card. Figuring it out would be a big improvement.

As Petersen explains, "It was a journey. And we've learned a lot about CPU limitations, shared compilation, DX9, and all of that effort is going to Xe2.

Some of the lessons learned have led to "fixing" some of the alchemists' mistakes to improve compatibility and efficiency. Shifting to SIMD8 rather than SIMD16 in each vector engine is one step towards that, Petersen says.1 "Our previous generation was SIMD8.That is, basically, 8 lanes are calculated for all instructions. We moved that architecture to 16 width, which has many efficient advantages."

The other is indirect support baked into the hardware via the command front-end, which is a commonly used command in game engines, including Unreal Engine5, which was previously emulated by Alchemist's software, which reduced the speed.

"Think of Xe2 as a next-generation GPU architecture designed to be highly game-compatible and highly utilized.

Higher utilization points attract my attention. Alchemist could not make the most of quite a bit of silicon for the money. If you recall back to the lead-up to the Arc A770, which was intended at the time to compete in the mid-range of Nvidia's lineup. But it couldn't stick and became an entry-level contender. 

If utilization increases with xe2, even Battlemage GPUs of similar sizes and specifications could perform far better than their comparable predecessors.

Render slices in the Xe2 architecture should have 3x mesh shading performance, 3x vertex fetch throughput, and lower unfiltered bandwidth requirements, and the commands are consistent with what the game uses frequently.

While some changes look small and cumbersome on a technical level, Intel's next Arc card and Lunar Lake laptop will appear, and one of the more significant

overhauls than the first generation Alchemist Gpu was the Xe2 ray Tracing unit (RTU). The new generation of units will have more machines to resolve BVH (bounding volume hierarchy) queries used to speed up ray tracing workloads in real time

Petersen will sign off with a comment on why they made some of these decisions. He says Intel is aiming for Gpu-compliant DirectX, but underestimated the need for it to be "similar to the dominant architecture" in other ways. 

So, basically, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. It is certainly the market leader in this case, Nvidia.

I don't care how Intel gets it done, it provides that the end result is a graphics card that I can game for sure. Speaking of which, Intel's drivers have improved considerably since Arc first came out, and we shouldn't lose any of that progress or improvement with the release of Battlemage. 

Similarly, the company has confirmed that both Lunar Lake and Battlemage will use the same driver.

"This gives us the same game drivers, the same game features, with the same release schedule as discrete graphics products," says Intel technical marketing director Robert Hallock.

Intel showed off Lunar Lake running F1 24 on Xess on the game's release date.

Intel will not confirm that important detail as to when the launch of Battlemage will appear.

"Xe2, it's definitely coming," Petersen said, but it's probably related to Lunar Lake, which will arrive in Q3 this year. It's the first time we can get Xe2 for ourselves and bash it through some benchmarks.