Intel Arc Battlemage GPUs Tipped For 2024 Launch With A Big Performance Uplift

After two years of driver work, Intel's current-generation Arc Alchemist discrete GPUs are competitive in their respective price brackets. The company could really use some new GPU hardware, however, if it wants to make more inroads into the PC gaming space. Fortunately, it looks like those parts are on the way, and maybe even sooner than previously thought.

A Chinese leaker known as 小敌鸽—xiǎo dí gē, or "Little Enemy Pigeon"—made a post on Weibo sharing what is apparently insider information from a presentation given by Intel and ASUS to Chinese tech media. The post has since been made private, but thankfully Videocardz catalogued the leaks as well as the photos in this post, which originate with 小敌鸽. First, the slides:


This slide shows an Intel presenter explaining what's going on with the Raptor Lake stability issues to the audience. The summary is essentially the same as we've covered recently; Intel's extending the warranty on Raptor Lake CPUs by two years. However, the top line in blue has a very important piece of news. Intel China apparently says that performance will not be affected by today's microcode updates. Obviously, we'll be testing that for ourselves when we can find the time.


Meanwhile, this image shows an Intel presenter in front of a slide explaining the message that Intel has been reiterating for a while now: five nodes in four years, with Intel's 20A and 18A processes integrating its RibbonFET Gate-All-Around (GAAFET) technology as well as its PowerVia implementation of back-side power delivery—both of which Intel will be first to bring to market if it continues to hit its milestones.


But what about Battlemage? Unfortunately, other slides from the event weren't shared, so we'll just have to take their words with the usual amount of granulated sodium chloride. In other words, consider these to be rumors, but they sound plausible to us—if they didn't, we wouldn't be reporting them.

小敌鸽 reported that Intel's upcoming discrete GPUs will launch by the end of the year. We have heard that rumored before, and indeed Intel even told us that multiple times before the launch of the original Arc GPUs, only for them to slip. The Pigeon also says that they will have "significant performance improvements."


That's to be expected given what Intel told us about the Xe2 architecture. The very same GPU architecture that will appear in Battlemage is also being used in Intel's Lunar Lake mobile processors. Intel's Tom Petersen told us at Computex that critical decisions made in the design of Alchemist and the original Xe architecture hampered both efficiency (and thus performance) as well as compatibility for games, and that Xe2 completely resolves these issues.