Intel recently confirmed its plans for its next-generation ARC GPU architecture, codenamed Battlemage, and when we can expect to see it. That window is next year.
The availability of Battlemage was confirmed via a roadmap that Intel has supposedly released to a Japanese media named 4Gamer. The roadmap, written in Japanese for obvious reasons, basically talked about products that were introduced earlier this year – Intel Meteor Lake, the corresponding Core Ultra series mobile CPUs, 5th Gen Xeon – that also included a list of products that lists the 2nd generation ARC GPU architecture as a potential launch product.
As a quick primer: back when Intel officially announced the existence of the ARC graphics lineup, it also listed the names of the four architectures in its roadmap. Alchemist was the inaugural GPU, Battlemage the second, Celestial the third, and Druid was the fourth. Further, each new architecture would also sport brand new Xe HPG cores, with the second-in-line being the Xe2 HPG, and so forth.
While the roadmap does indicate that Battlemage is expected to launch next year, the slide is devoid of any other information: there’s no exact launch date, nor are there any details or specifications that we can expect from the GPU. Of course, speculation and the internet being the potent rumour cocktail mix that they are, have speculated that we could be looking at GDDR6X, which would be too far-fetched, given that that is the graphics VRAM standard that’s being used by Intel rivals NVIDIA and AMD.
On that note, Intel had promised that Battlemage would be an entirely different animal in terms of performance and that its 2nd generation ARC would at least be on par with NVIDIA’s high-end Ampere-based GPUs, but not the ones with the Ada Lovelace GPUs. One speculation forecasts that the flagship model in the lineup, alleged codename BMG-G10, would have a TGP of 22W, while another would require 150W to run it.
(Source: 4Gamer, Videocardz)
