According to recent reports, Intel Graphics employees accidentally revealed that the company's Xe2 "Battlemage" graphics architecture is being designed for the 4 nm silicon fabrication node. This would give Intel's GPU designers a significant increase in transistor density and power headroom, as TSMC 4 nm is an EUV node compared to the current 6 nm DUV node that the company builds its Arc "Alchemist" GPUs on. The leak also seems to confirm that its succeeding "Celestial" graphics architecture is being designed for 3 nm.
An enthusiast named gamma0burst discovered these details by sifting through public profiles of several Intel employees. It is almost certain that Xe2 "Battlemage" will be built on the TSMC 4 nm node, and to a slightly lesser degree, about Xe3 "Celestial" being designed for TSMC's 3 nm N3X node.
Intel roadmaps suggest that "Battlemage" will debut in 2023-2024, although this could also refer to the iGPU of the upcoming Core "Meteor Lake" processors that debut in the second half of 2023. Intel is highly likely to deliver "Meteor Lake" within its 2H-2023 timeline, which would mean that the mention of "2024" in the graphics technology roadmap could mean that discrete GPUs based on "Battlemage" only arrive next year. The same logic applies to Xe3 "Celestial," with the company mentioning "2024+" on the roadmap slide, which could mean that "Celestial" will debut with an iGPU for a future Intel Core processor (such as "Panther Lake"), and as a discrete GPU only later.
Intel is expected to take advantage of the 4 nm node to double the SIMD machinery on the largest "Battlemage" discrete GPU. It is rumored that this chip will feature as many as 1,024 execution units (EU), which doubles the unified shader count to 8,192 over the current Arc A770. In addition to doubling the shaders with higher IPC and clock speeds, "Battlemage" could also introduce larger on-die caches on the GPU to speed up the memory sub-system.
