Intel Arc Battlemage GPUs Launching By Black Friday? Here's What We Know
Intel's next generation Arc Battlemage GPU architecture remains on the roadmap and may even show up in just a handful of months—in time for this year's holiday shopping season, if murmurs coming out of the Embedded World 2024 conference are any indication. The unofficial goal is to launch Battlemage "before Black Friday," which this year falls on November 29, 2024.
Battlemage represents Intel's second generation discrete Arc graphics architecture. Intel kicked off the discrete GPU party—its first since Larrabee—with its Xe-HPG GPU codenamed Alchemist, which launched around this time two years ago. Intel's multi-pronged approach included mobile, desktop, and workstation solutions comprising its Arc 3, Arc 5, Arc 7, and Arc Pro products.
For gamers, Arc arrived at a time when discrete graphics cards were in short supply, offering a relatively affordable alternative to the status quo, at least in the entry-level and mid-range markets (there's no Arc GPU that truly competes with the fastest GPUs from AMD and NVIDIA). Since launching, Intel's engineers have done a commendable job buttoning up performance on older titles through frequent driver releases, many of which have delivered monster gains in select games.
Looking ahead, Intel's Xe2-HPG GPUs codenamed Battlemage could arrive this year, according to Volker Risska at ComputerBase. Citing unnamed industry sources, Risska writes (via Google Translate) that Intel is aiming for a pre-Black Friday launch in order to take advantage of the holiday shopping season.
If that's the case, Intel still has several months to finalize whichever Battlemage GPUs will ship first, as well get them into mass production and in the hands of their hardware partners.
This is certainly within the realm of possibility, given what Intel has divulged up to this point. For example, back in January, Intel's Tom 'Tap' Peterson went on record saying that the first silicon for Battlemage was already in the labs. He also said that "30% of [Intel's] graphics engineers" are working on the software, as the hardware team had already moved on to the next thing.
A little more recently, a supposed Arc Battlemage GPU packing 12GB of VRAM and 24 Xe cores was spotted in SiSoftware's SANDRA database. There's also a Japanese-language Intel side floating around (see above) that has Battlemage on the roadmap for 2024. The pertinent part of the slide is on the bottom right, with text that translates to "upcoming products" next to the same GPU image that Intel has used in the past to represent Battlemage.
Interestingly, it's also come to light that NVIDIA's hardware partners are expecting team green to launch its GeForce RTX 50 series in the fourth quarter of this year, starting with the GeForce RTX 5090 and GeForce RTX 5080. If all this comes to fruition (plus whatever AMD has in store), 2024 could end with a bang as we head into 2025.
