Intel Confirms AVX10 For Nova Lake, Adds XeSS Frame Gen For Meteor Lake iGPUs

Intel's been making moves under the radar lately, and they're good news for Team Blue—not only do the most recent GitHub Intel Xess 2,1 SDK patch notes reveal that Frame Gen is coming to Core Ultra 100-series iGPUs, but the 60th Edition of Intel's ISA Extensions Reference confirms that AVX10.2 is, in fact, coming to Nova Lake, contrary to expectations. The confirmation of AVX10.2 for Nova Lake is a particularly huge deal, since documentation released last month suggested support for it was being dropped. Fortunately for Intel CPU users, the next-gen of Intel's desktop CPUs will in fact include the contentious instruction set extension, which is particularly good news in face of AMD Zen 6 already having confirmed AVX-512 support.

Besides confirming XeSS Frame Gen coming to Meteor Lake iGPU solutions, the GitHub patch notes also detail a series of fixes being rolled out for the XeSS SDK at large, including improvements to error reporting and logging. These won't directly benefit end users, but should help developers seeking to implement Intel's AI-powered graphics libraries into their games.


The change to the ISA Extensions Reference was actually spotted by @InstLatX64 on X (formerly Twitter), and additionally confirms Intel APX coming to Intel Nova Lake, as well. While APX is a much smaller change to the ISA versus AVX10.2, it's arguably a much more important addition that should reduce the amount of access calls to cache and memory, which should approve efficiency for APX-enabled CPUs. AVX10.2, meanwhile, is essentially a superset of the older AVX-512 instruction set extensions that have seen little use in consumer software but are very important in the HPC world; their absence made developing such software on Intel's client platforms more painful than it should have been.

The ISA Extensions Reference also refers to 8-bit floating point operations (FP8) being supported in the E5M2 and E4M3 formats as part of Intel AVX 10.2 on Intel Nova Lake CPUs. FP8 instructions are great for AI training and inference processes, known best for being run on NVIDIA GPUs rather than Intel CPUs, but AVX in general is meant to improve a CPU's handling for large, complex instructions that would otherwise be restricted to GPUs or simply not supported at all. Intel re-affirming commitment to AVX 10.2 and expanding its functionality is a welcome sign that it's taking its competition with AMD seriously, so hopefully we see a more competitive lineup from Intel in the ever-important desktop segment next year.