Intel Battlemage will be the second modern generation of graphics card out of Intel, and likely to arrive before the end of the year. But when, exactly? Only Intel knows for sure, but new industry info points to a release date sometime before Black Friday. For non-Americans, the Battlemage launch is alleged to be sometime before November 29.
ComputerBase reports that Battlemage will turn up before Black Friday citing "industry circles" at Embedded World 2024.
The Battlemage architecture will be used across desktop graphics cards of the grade we could be interested in for a spot of PC gaming, which puts it much higher on my list of 'things I'm interested in' from Embedded World 2024.
The event is actually dedicated to low-power chips, and Intel has announced six new embedded GPUs over there. These aren't anything new for us gamers, just a rehash of Alchemist GPUs intended for edge systems, but it is surprisingly to see a 225W GPU make an appearance. For AI, no doubt.
To some extent, this Black Friday information is nothing ground-breaking. It's our understanding that Intel would aim to release Battlemage sometime in the second half of 2024, and with December mostly a write-off due to big holidays and breaks, sometime before the end of November seems like a given. That said, this rumour would suggest that there's no hint of a delay to Battlemage at this moment. Though, again, only Intel knows for sure.
Intel confirmed that Battlemage is up-and-running in its labs earlier this year. That means the actual silicon is working, but whether the actual graphics cards are ready yet is another thing entirely. That relies on Intel's own product line production—Intel produced the first wave of Arc A750 and Arc A770 Limited Editions cards itself—and its partners, which generally produce all of the Arc cards available today. Intel only managed to convince a few manufacturers to jump on Arc early on, and it's likely hoping to win over a few more with Battlemage.
The most important person Intel has to win over with Battlemage is you. Alchemist was shaky at launch, got a bit better with time, and ended up, briefly, as a half-decent budget graphics card with a whole lotta VRAM for the money. Nowadays, however, it struggles to compete with AMD's more recent RX 7600. Battlemage will have to do better, and that's a tough job versus AMD and Nvidia, though the latter hasn't really a great budget GPU to its name right now. The good news for Intel is that all those driver issues won't (or shouldn't) be coming back. Those kinks have been ironed out—that should still apply to all the future Arc products too.
Intel will be aiming higher than purely cheapo budget GPUs with Battlemage. Speaking to Arc guru Tom Petersen last year, he gave the impression he'd like to see Intel's graphics division be more profitable. I took from that a desire to offer more performance and therefore charge more money for its cards. The Arc A770 should've performed better, hence the oddly sizeable spec, but ultimately Intel couldn't justify charging any more for it.
It'll be exciting to see if Intel gets there, or if instead it's another long wait until third-gen Celestial comes around.
