Intel's plan to stack an Arc GPU on its Meteor Lake CPUs will form 'a new class of graphics'

pcgamer.com:

Intel has some absolutely wild plans for upcoming processor graphics, and it's all kicking off with Meteor Lake in 2023. Intel plans to stack some of its Arc graphics on top of the CPU and SoC components, which it says will deliver discrete graphics performance with something more of what we'd expect from today's integrated graphics in efficiency.

«Meteor Lake is a brand new architecture that will enable tiled GPUs to be integrated on a 3D package. This is super exciting as this allows us to offer discrete graphics-class performance with the efficiency of integrated graphics,» says Raja Koduri, Intel chief architect, during the company's latest investor briefing. (If you don't know what a tiled GPU is, don't worry—we explain a bit below).

«This is a new class of graphics—you can't really call it integrated or discrete.»

It appears as though Meteor Lake will integrate 2nd gen Arc graphics, called Battlemage. That's not noted explicitly, but from the diagram below it seems that Intel's graphics generations will be in lock-step with CPU generations.

What we know so far is that Intel plans to launch Meteor Lake around 2023, as we have Intel Raptor Lake processors (based on Alder Lake) set to arrive before then. There will also be another generation following that, assumedly sharing the same architecture but with some improvements, though the name has not been confirmed by Intel.

We have heard of Meteor Lake's chiplets prior to this, though. Intel had released a diagram showing its three-tile architecture (Compute, SoC, and GPU), though later pictures snapped by a CNET reporter showed another fourth chiplet on the package. It's early days, so we'll see where that goes, but it'll be exciting to see how this 3D packaged Arc GPU