Intel Arrow Lake-S with Xe-LPG graphics without the plus

Intel is gearing up to launch its Arrow Lake architecture by the end of this year.

Arrow Lake will be the company’s first top-to-bottom client architecture featuring entirely new CPU and GPU architecture in years. The series following Meteor Lake launch, which came with a brand-new GPU cores called Xe-LPG, will also support this architecture with some variants known as LPG+. Turns out this plus will not apply to all Arrow Lake products.

As reported by Coelacanth’s Dream, only the Arrow Lake-H will use LPG+ while the desktop variants known as ARL-S (Arrow Lake-S) will get Xe-LPG instead. Intel introduced the following changes to the code of “C for Metal Compiler (cm-compiler):

Xe-LPG+ only for mobile Arrow Lake variants, Source: Github

As explained by an Intel engineer, only some SKUs will feature Xe-LPG+ which is listed by intel as GFX version 12.74. This differentiation will require Intel to list separate PCI Device IDs within the software to correctly show which version is supported.

Some SKUs of Arrow Lake use a slightly newer Xe_LPG+ graphics IP (version 12.74). Add some additional PCI IDs and extend the code to support this newer IP version. The general code flow should continue to match existing MTL and Xe_LPG code paths.

— Haridhar Kalvala, Intel engineer

As far as rumors and leaks are concerned, the Xe-LPG+ is said to support DPAS (Dot Product Accumulate Systolic) instructions. This instruction is already used by Xe-HPG architecture, but was disabled in the LPG variant. Its purpose is to support FP16, BF16, IN4 and INT4 multiplication with 16 or 32 bits accumulate. This means that through the XMX core, the GPU can perform many more operations per clock. Intel has detailed this instruction in the Xe-HPG overview here .

Intel Arrow Lake-S is expected to launch this year, and the mobile Arrow Lake-H and low-power Lunar Lake-MX series are expected to follow it soon.

Source: Coelacanth’s Dream