News Intel's Arc GPU Roadmap Leaked: Two Battlemage GPUs Coming in 2024

[thestryker]

Battlemage is likely DOA as a high-end product, I give Intel a practically zero chance of Intel nailing it on the second try after missing the mark by over a year on Alchemist. I thought Intel saying BM was still on schedule meant 2023, 2024 will certainly be too little too late unless BM scales way more aggressively than anything ever launched before, which would smell like a moonshot before scrapping the whole idea for missing the impossible target again.

We don't know where a properly designed Alchemist would have fallen, and quite frankly I think it would have been somewhere in between the 3070 and 3080 in performance for the high end SKU. I would assume that for BM they will have the obvious problems all squared away which would allow them to offer higher performance SKUs. This roadmap however would dump them right into the follow up to Ada and RDNA 3 which just won't fly even if they weren't targeting top tier (I was thinking the same as you they were talking 2023 for full release). They'd end up in the same boat of having to sell larger silicon for less money and that just isn't going to work to keep the division going.

If AMD and Nvidia's trend of pissing on the low-end continues though, that field will be wide-open for Intel to seize if it wants to. IMO, this is really what it needs to focus on until it sorts its crap out. Lower-risk, lower-rewards but also a more forgiving audience instead of a spectacular high-stakes failure.

While I agree with you I think it's too late for them to change the type of design to fit lower tier without taking a hit on the silicon costs. This would be a lot less of a problem if Intel was using its own fabs to make the Arc chips, but as long as they're using TSMC they're likely paying at best what AMD/nvidia are.