LOOKING TO THE FUTURE & LEARNING OUR ABCs
Arc might be the first dedicated GPU from Intel since the late 1990s, but it’s already looking toward future offerings. According to Intel Fellow, Tom Petersen, most of the Arc team has now moved on to the next generation Battlemage, which is well underway. However, having learned a lesson or two from the Alchemist launch, Intel isn’t giving any firm dates for Battlemage yet.
What we do know is that Intel will be looking at ways to improve performance and will likely move to a newer process node. Alchemist uses TSMC’s N6, which is a refined version of the N7 process that was launched back in 2019. AMD and Nvidia are moving on to 5nm-class nodes for their latest GPU architectures, and next year, it would be unthinkable for Intel to launch a new GPU that doesn’t at least use a 5nm process.
Beyond Battlemage, Intel has plans for Celestial and Druid. Intel will be taking an ABCs approach to its GPU names going forward, with products still under the Arc brand but with a different letter at the front. That means we’ll have Arc B-series GPUs when Battlemage arrives, followed by C-series with Celestial, and so on. What comes after Druid, though... Elves and Fairies, perhaps?
Given the delayed launch and arrival of the Arc Alchemist GPUs, it’s possible that we’ll see Battlemage arrive sometime in 2023. Intel has been executing a consistent yearly release cadence on its CPUs for quite a while, albeit with occasional stumbles along the way.
Given that many businesses function on a rotating yearly cycle of upgrades, it wouldn’t be such a terrible thing if Intel could start offering new graphics products alongside its future CPUs.
Or perhaps that’s just wishful thinking on our part.