We have already confirmed that Intel is continuing the development of Arc gaming GPUs beyond the current Xe2 "Battlemage" series, with the new Xe3 "Celestial" architecture in the works. However, thanks to PCWorld's The Full Nerd podcast, Tom Petersen of Intel confirmed that the Xe3 IP has been finished, and the hardware teams are already working on the next Xe4 "Druid" GPU IP. "Our architects are way ahead of us, and they are already working on not the next thing but the next thing after the next thing," said Petersen, adding: "The way I would like to comment is our IP that's kind of called Xe3, which is the one after Xe2, that's pretty much baked, right. And so the software teams have a lot of work to do on Xe3. The hardware teams are off on the next thing, right. That's our cadence, that we need to keep going."

The base IP of next-generation Xe3 "Celestial" GPUs is done. That means the basic media engines, Xe cores, XMX matrix engines, ray tracing engines, and other parts of the gaming GPU are already designed and most likely awaiting trial fabrication. The software to support this Xe3 is also being developed while Intel's team is working on enabling more optimizations for the Xe2 "Battlemage" architecture, which we previewed recently. We assume that Intel's Xe GPU will now follow a stricter cadence of releases, with SKUs getting updated much faster, given that a lot is prepared for the future.

Intel Graphics in an interview with PC Gamer on the sidelines of the 2022 IFA Berlin, claimed that the real-time ray tracing architecture of the Xe-HPG graphics architecture in the Arc A770 "Alchemist" graphics card is "competitive or better than" the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060, and that the company plans to launch the card at an attractive price-point, to grab a slice of the very top of the gaming graphics market bell-curve. The RTX 3060 is a very successful GPU, especially with graphics card prices on the chill, and AMD is already competing with its Radeon RX 6650 XT, which can be spotted at lower prices. The RTX 3060 has been in the crosshairs of Intel Graphics marketing, in recent performance reveals for the A770.

"When you have a title that is optimized for Intel, in the sense that it runs well on DX12, you're gonna get performance that's significantly above an [RTX] 3060," said Tom Petersen with Intel Graphics. "When you have a title that is optimized for Intel, in the sense that it runs well on DX12, you're gonna get performance that's significantly above an [RTX] 3060. And this is A750 compared to a 3060, so 17%, 14%, 10%. It's going to vary of course based on the title," he said. "We're going to be a little bit faster but depending on your game and depending on your settings, it's trading blows, and that's the A750. Obviously, A770 is going to be a little bit faster. So when you add in DX11, you're gonna see our performance is a little less trading blows, and we're kind of behind in some cases, ahead in some cases, but more losses than wins at DX11," he added. While Intel is still non-committal about a launch date, although it stated that the Arc A770 and A750 will launch with an attractive "introductory pricing."

Anyone remotely familiar with NVIDIA knows of their now erstwhile distinguished engineer Thomas A. Petersen, better known simply as Tom Petersen or TAP. He was a delight to work with as far as the tech media is concerned, including TechPowerUp, and was a source of technical information on NVIDIA microarchitectures as well as features targeting the general consumer and prosumer alike. The last few keynote presentations have had a visible lack of Tom on screen, and even in person to where we were discussing internally whether he had taken on a more "behind the scenes" approach at the company. As it turns out, Tom is the latest in line to have attracted the eyes of Intel as the latter gears up to the challenge of gaining marketing share in the discrete GPU business in the years to come.

Tom confirmed on his Facebook page this past Friday that he was indeed leaving NVIDIA, with March 29 being his last working day there. He was quick to note his unemployment status on his LinkedIn profile in a humorous manner as well, and this was surely not for long given news broke shortly from Hothardware, and then Gamers Nexus, who both independently verified from their contacts at Intel that Tom Petersen was headed to the blue team sooner than later. Aside from being a media liaison for technical marketing, he has been at the forefront for the development of tools to help benchmark render response and effectiveness (FCAT), contributed to NVIDIA's GPU BOOST technology directly, and no doubt will be an important contributor at Intel to complement the vast number of PR and media personnel joining their ranks in the recent few months. We are excited to see what Tom helps bring to the table, and wish him the best to help create a more open and competing dGPU market for us.