Intel Arc Battlemage Is Coming, Engineers Already Working On Intel Arc Celestial

Intel Arc Battlemage Is Coming

In an interview with PC World, Tom “TAP” Petersen, a former NVIDIA executive and now an Intel Fellow, has assured that Battlemage is advancing as expected. He hinted that the new GPU could be unveiled before CES 2025, but did not give any specific dates, as Intel had to postpone the launch of Arc A7 GPUs by more than six months.

Intel finally launched the mid-range Arc GPU series, despite facing stiff competition from AMD and NVIDIA, who had superior and more optimized architectures. Intel countered this by slashing the prices of A7 GPUs to under $200 for 8GB variants and $250 for 16GB, as seen in recent months.

The next-generation Bxxx series of discrete GPUs will be powered by the Xe2-HPG architecture, codenamed Battlemage. Intel has kept the details of this architecture under wraps, but some rumors have surfaced. They suggest that it could have up to 56 Xe-Cores, a revamped memory system and enhanced ray tracing capabilities.

Petersen has revealed that around 30% of the Intel team is working on the software for the Xe2 Battlemage. The software was the weak point of the Alchemist series. But Intel has improved the drivers and the company has just announced its first gaming handheld in partnership with MSI.

It’s coming, I am excited about it, and all our engineers you know how they are constantly doing their engineering things. I’d say about 30% of our engineers are working on Battlemage, mostly on the software side because our hardware team is on the next thing (Celestial), so think about it as the Battlemage has already has its first silicon in the labs which is very exciting and there’s more good news coming which I can’t talk about right now. - Tom Petersen (PCWorld interview @ CES 2024

Petersen also confirms that the Intel GPU hardware team is busy with the next project, the Xe3 Celestial architecture. It’s interesting to note that the Xe2 architecture is expected to debut with Lunar Lake (now confirmed for 2024) while the Xe3 architecture is planned to launch with the Panther Lake CPU series at a later date.