Intel made its official comeback to the dedicated graphics card market in 2022 with the Alchemist Arc series, which showed promising performance.
Despite not boasting high-end performance, Intel Arc has managed to carve out a niche in the market through persistent optimization improvements and offering reasonable performance-to-price ratio. It has garnered recognition from many users and gradually made its way into various domains including desktops, laptops, workstations, and embedded systems. Even the integrated graphics of Intel's Core Ultra series now utilize the same architecture.
Rumors about the second-generation product, Battlemage, have been circulating for a while. Initially expected to be released by the end of 2023 or early 2024, the latest updates suggest that it won't be until this fall, possibly as late as November or even earlier.
Intel's choice of timing is primarily aimed at capitalizing on the peak shopping season towards the end of the year in the United States, especially during Black Friday, with hopes of also tapping into the Singles' Day sales in China.
The second generation of Arc graphics cards will feature two distinct cores: the mainstream-oriented G10 and the entry-level-focused G21. They are expected to target power consumption levels of 225W and 150W respectively, while notably absent from the high-end flagship market.
Currently, both cores are still in development, with G21 in the pre-qualification stage, indicating that it has essentially completed engineering samples and is undergoing testing for chip functionality, reliability, performance, and power consumption.
If all goes well and the yield of trial production meets expectations, mass production can commence.
Progress on G10 is uncertain and may be similar.
Earlier this year, Intel disclosed that software development and optimization for the second generation of Arc graphics cards are underway, while the hardware team has shifted most of its focus to the development of the third generation Celestial.
Leaked information suggests that changes in the Battlemage architecture include improvements in microarchitecture, enhanced ray tracing performance, upgrades to the next-generation memory subsystem and memory compression technology, advancements in next-generation machine learning rendering technology, and strengthening of Deep Link collaboration capabilities, possibly supporting PCIe 5.0.
