Some Intel Arrow Lake CPUs To Feature Revised Xe LPG+ Graphics IP

The Intel engineers enabling next-generation Arrow Lake processors for Linux have largely been just adding new device IDs and other mostly minor changes over current Meteor Lake processors. It was that way too for Arrow Lake's integrated graphics with largely re-using existing Meteor Lake graphics support, but now it's come to light that select Arrow Lake SKUs will feature updated graphics IP.

To this point it looked like Arrow Lake "ARL" integrated graphics were largely similar to the exciting Meteor Lake Arc Graphics but new patches posted today indicate that some Arrow Lake SKUs will have a new revision of their Xe LPG+ graphics IP.

In a new patch series posted this morning entitled "Extend ARL support", it's brought up:

"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."

The driver changes still are minor compared to the existing Xe LPG+ graphics IP, at least for this initial patch series. It will be interesting to see once released what the differences and overall performance impact or feature changes are with the v12.74 Xe_LPG+ graphics IP compared to current Xe LPG. The new Intel Arrow Lake graphics PCI IDs added that have this updated graphics IP include 0x7D41, 0x7D51, and 0x7DD1.

Meanwhile it's after Arrow Lake with Lunar Lake where Xe2 graphics are coming and should be quite interesting. Intel engineers already have been working heavily on preparing for their open-source Xe2 graphics support.

Outside of the Linux kernel patches, over in user-space the Intel Graphics Compiler saw a new patch merged with 1.46k lines of new code. That Intel Graphics Compiler (IGC) support prepares for Arrow Lake with Xe LPG+ and Lunar Lake with Xe2. Expect more IGC work to happen there especially for Xe2 but nice in any event to see that open-source code landing now well in advance of launch. The IGC support is critical for Intel's Compute Runtime with oneAPI Level Zero and OpenCL plus being used by Microsoft Windows as their graphics shader compiler.