Intel's Next-Gen Arc Battlemage Gaming GPU Spotted In Chip Lab
Intel's first Arc graphics cards were underwhelming on launch, and if you believed certain sources, the company was going to can the whole project as a result. Of course, that's not how things have played out—Intel has put considerable effort into improving those first Arc graphics cards, to the point that your author would recommend them without reservation to gamers playing primarily AAA games.
In case you still have doubts about the future of Intel Arc, just know that the company's next-gen graphics parts are already in pre-production. That news comes from one Mr. Andreas Schilling, editor-in-chief over at German hardware site HardwareLuxx. He recently took a tour of Intel's facility in Malaysia, and apparently saw quite a few cool things as evinced by his article on the topic, linked above.
However, arguably the most exciting thing that he saw, he wasn't allowed to photograph. That would be a tray in Intel's Failure Analysis Lab that contained chips marked as "BMG G10". It doesn't take a genius to put two and two together and compare BMG-G10 to ACM-G10, the codename of the Alchemist GPU used in the Arc A770 and A750. Clearly, these were Battlemage dice.
Unfortunately, not much is actually known about Battlemage at this time. Leaks from early this year placed BMG-G10 at 225W, and Intel's roadmap seemed to imply that it would creep up into the "Enthusiast" class of performance that the A770 only brushed up against. Other rumors claimed that Battlemage would double the number of Xe cores on the top-end part, in comparison to Arc Alchemist.
In that case, we could be looking at something competitive with the GeForce RTX 4070 and Radeon RX 7800 XT. If Intel continues its strategy of competing on price, Battlemage could end up delivering a solid midrange graphics card with real 4K60 or 1440p120 performance in the latest games, like Immortals of Aveum. The company is expected to launch Battlemage sometime next year.
