Overhauled Intel Nova Lake CPUs rumored to incorporate Xe3 Celestial and Xe4 Druid IPs for enhanced graphics, media, and display capabilities.
Let's Talk Nova Lake:
Intel's upcoming superstar, the Nova Lake chips are set to kick some serious tech butt! These bad boys will introduce a game-changing, modular design by combining Xe3 and Xe4 IPs to manage different engines on the chip.
The man who's always in the know, Jaykihn, leaked the lowdown on this: Nova Lake-S is gonna use Celestial for its graphics engine, while Druid will rule the roost for media and display functions, likely on a separate SoC Tile.
The disaggregated chiplet design from Meteor Lake is going strong here, offering Intel flexibility to manufacture less critical chip elements using cheaper processes. In Meteor Lake, the media and display capabilities were split, with the media and display units on a separate System-on-Chip (SoC) chiplet, produced using TSMC's N6 process, while the graphics engine stayed on a separate tile made with TSMC's N5 technology. This trend has been observed in Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake, but Nova Lake is reportedly about to take things to the next level by using separate and specialized IPs like Xe3 and Xe4 for these blocks.
So, what does all that geek speak mean? Well, the integrated graphics (iGPU) on Nova Lake-S (for desktop use) will be powered by Xe3 (Celestial), while the graphics and media engine will shift to the more advanced Xe4 (Druid). This means your integrated GPU might be a beast, but the most significant improvements could come from hardware codec support thanks to a shift to a next-gen architecture.
According to Bionic_Squash, the graphics engine might get a slightly modified version of Xe3, and if it's an improvement over Vanilla Xe3 (which we'll see in Panther Lake), it could be comparable to the leap from Meteor Lake's Xe-LPG to Arrow Lake's Xe-LPG+ (just for mobile).
Beyond Nova Lake, this is excellent news for future graphics products from Intel. We might see Druid-powered engines as early as 2026, and Celestial, already in pre-validation, is set to power Panther Lake CPUs next year. It's not a stretch to say that Nova Lake might serve as a test vehicle for Druid, paving the way for a future, full-fledged product that employs Druid graphics.
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- The upcoming Nova Lake chips from Intel promise to revolutionize technology with a modular design that combines Xe3 and Xe4 IPs for enhanced performance.
- With the integration of Xe3 (Celestial) and the potential future introduction of the more advanced Xe4 (Druid), technology advancements in Intel's upcoming hardware are promising, providing significant improvements in graphics and media capabilities.
