Intel Gives Update on Xe2 Battlemage GPUs

14.01.2024 - 13:43 / gamerant.com / Dominik Bo

Intel is hoping to ship its Arc Xe2 Battlemage line of discrete graphics cards in the second half of this year, a senior company official has revealed. The tech giant's upcoming series should hence add to the selection of 2024's gaming GPUs.

The first generation of Intel's discrete GPUs was originally released in 2022, following several delays. Those Intel Arc cards were based on the company's Xe-HPG architecture, which was code-named Alchemist. The Xe2-HPG architecture, AKA Intel Arc Battlemage, has long been poised to improve on its predecessor, although Intel remains fairly secretive about its release details.

Be that as it may, the company finally broke silence on the Arc Battlemage line during CES 2024. Speaking to PCWorld, Intel Fellow Tom Petersen estimated that «about 30%» of the company's engineers are currently tasked with finalizing Battlemage. Their ongoing efforts are mostly focused on the software side of things, while the majority of Intel's hardware team is already working on the next big thing, which is the Arc Xe3 Celestial architecture.

In the meantime, the first Battlemage chips already exist in Intel's labs, so the project itself is currently on course for commercialization in the near future. Elaborating on that point, Petersen said that he hopes the Battlemage GPU line will launch before CES 2025. Based on that prediction and the company's recent release schedule, a late 2024 launch seems to be on the cards for Battlemage. This status update dovetails with a number of recent leaks concerning the Intel Arc roadmap, all of which suggested that the Battlemage line could hit the market circa 2024.

While many consumers welcomed Intel's return to the GPU market due to the added competition that the tech giant provided to Nvidia and AMD, the company's first-gen offerings received somewhat lukewarm reviews. That's largely because the Alchemist graphics cards launched with lackluster software that inhibited their overall potential. Nevertheless, Intel has been hard at work improving this aspect of its GPUs ever since, inspiring hope among the fandom that the Battlemage generation will be free of such growing pains at launch.

Intel's latest GPU roadmap includes two more confirmed product generations beyond Battlemage: Celestial and Druid. Not much is known about either, although Celestial is expected to be based on TSMC's 3nm process node. In the meantime, Intel also appears to be pushing for more consumer-facing applications of its GPU tech. That ambition was most recently underlined by the emergence of the MSI Claw, a flashy Steam Deck rival boasting Intel Arc graphics.

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