Intel’s Next-Gen Battlemage GPUs Are Already In A Better Spot Than Alchemist
The majority of AXG is already working diligently on their next-generation Battlemage GPUs, even as Intel Arc Alchemist GPUs are already formally rolling out and scheduled to ship next week.
Arc Alchemist GPUs for the mass market was first exhibited to us yesterday, and while they have some great potential, Intel’s driver stack is now the major hindrance. The Arc software ecosystem will be developed by the gaming community by trying it out and contributing vital game performance and stability data to Intel. Arc Alchemist GPUs will begin rolling out to customers in the upcoming week.
Intel is already working on its next-generation GPU architecture, dubbed Battlemage, even though it is still making improvements to its drivers. Raja Koduri, the head of the Arc GPU division, really revealed details about their next Arc range when participating in an Arc graphics roundtable. Raja stated that the majority of the silicon team has already been assigned to the platform engineering and development of Battlemage, in addition to their ongoing work on preliminary software systems.
The bulk of the silicon team is working on Battlemage and platform engineering and some amount of the software resources have also been […].”
-Raja Koduri
In terms of comparisons with the Alchemist GPUs, Intel already has its first generation of Arc GPUs available, so they have that as a baseline. The next-generation GPU is far better than what Alchemist had when Battlemage was at the same stage, and when combined with the second claim about the engine being bigger and better, we may anticipate Intel to compete in the high-end market next to NVIDIA’s and AMD’s future-generation GPUs.
We are in the second generation. For the first generation, there wasn’t a good reference point for you to compare so now that you have a reference point, we do have comparisons. Like we track the number of open bugs and when we start a project, we set some performance goals and we do pre-silicon verification.
So when we look at all of those vectors, it’s (Battlemage) substantially better at this point in time than where Alchemist was around.
Raja Koduri put an end to all the online rumours last month that the Arc brand was being discontinued, but it appears that the reality is quite different now that Intel’s design engineers are already at work on the next Battlemage DG3 and Celestial GPUs.
We’re not going anywhere on our discrete business. And our discrete business is the basic technology development that goes both into the data center and integrated GPUs. I feel like there’s a lot of FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) out there. I’d just like to be clear: we’re not going anywhere.
Most of our ASIC team is on Battlemage. A small portion of it is on our future, which is Celestial. And then there’s a very small portion on Alchemist today, but they’re kind of different function sets. So like a board and, what I’ll call, chip teams are on Alchemist right now. Kind of think of it as getting our board just right, getting our BIOS just right, making all the final tuning. But the bulk of our design team is on Battlemage.”
Arc Alchemist GPUs are Intel’s initial foray into the mass market and volume market. Arc Battlemage GPUs are Intel’s next step into the high-performance and enthusiast market. However, the fact that Intel has a range that intends to increase competition in the graphics industry is exciting for gamers and content creators. Of course, we first have to wait and see how the Arc 7 series performs before we can speak about next-gen technology.
