A look into the future: Intel’s release of its new graphics cards for desktop PCs has not been a resounding success. Arc Alchemist arrived with so many problems and mediocre reviews that there were rumors that the company would cut its losses and abandon the entire project. But Chipzilla is not giving up on the desire for its GPUs to become a real alternative to Nvidia and AMD cards, and this may happen when Battlemage appears next year.
Intel and Raja Koduri, chief architect and senior vice president of the company’s architecture, graphics and software division, have repeatedly stated that Arc will not disappear. According to a supposedly leaked roadmap from RedGamingTech, we now know Intel’s future plans for its discrete desktop cards.
The roadmap shows that Intel will release two 150-watt SKUs in the current Arc series during this quarter: SKU3 (D23-P5) and SKU5 (D23-M3), both of which are mid-range cards with 6 GB of 16 Gbps memory.
The roadmap also includes an updated family of Arc Alchemist GPUs called Alchemist+. It is planned (or was planned) to be released in the third quarter of the year and, apparently, it is based on the ACM+ G21 GPU for top cards with a TDP rating of 175-225 watts and ACM+ G20 for budget offerings with a TDP range from 75 to 100 watts.
This is next year, when everything can be interesting. Intel will finally enter the enthusiast graphics card market with its Battlemage GPUs based on the Xe2-HPG microarchitecture. The high-performance BMG-G10 GPU with a TDP of <225 watts will appear in the second quarter of 2024, and the BMG-G21 GPU with a TDP of <150 watts will appear later in the same quarter.
Battlemage looks like it will have a number of updates, including improved ray tracing, microarchitecture improvements, a next-generation memory and compression subsystem, new machine learning rendering technology, the latest DeepLink capabilities and next-generation machine learning-based rendering technology. Intel writes that the cards will be aimed at market segments focused on performance and games for enthusiasts.
Following Battlemage in Intel’s series of maps inspired by the D&D titles will be Celestial and Druid. Last year, Tom Petersen from Intel said that most of the ASIC team is working on Battlemage, a small part on Celestial and even less on Alchemist.
