Intel’s Battlemage graphics cards are still very much alive and kicking, if there was any doubt – and it looks like Team Blue will be making higher-end 2nd-gen GPUs to boot.
Wccftech spotted a tweet from Andreas Schilling, who is editor at German tech site Hardwareluxx, and has just seen Battlemage in action.
I’ve seen wafers with Emerald Rapids XCC on them, that were being cut. Not a surprise at all, but still ...Also MTL682_C0, so Meteor Lake with 6 P-Cores, 8 E-Cores and GT2 Graphic Tile tested in a C0 stepping and finally the Failure Lab already saw BMG G10 - Battlemage is real. https://t.co/rKr7au95JZAugust 29, 2023
Specifically, Schilling informs us that on a visit to Intel in Malaysia, part of the tour took in Team Blue’s ‘Failure Lab’ in which BMG G10, a Battlemage GPU, was being put through its paces.
As Schilling observes: “Battlemage is real.”
Among other bits and pieces Intel showed off, the editor also got a peek at a Meteor Lake CPU with six performance cores and eight efficiency cores. That could be a workhorse of a laptop processor, and as we’ve seen recently, Intel is planning to make great use of AI with these next-gen mobile chips.
Analysis: High level mage incoming
This is an interesting leak around Intel’s next-gen GPUs for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it certainly dispels previous whispers that Team Blue might just can its second-gen Arc graphics cards entirely. And secondly, it indicates that as another more recent rumor contended, Intel won’t just produce lower-end Battlemage GPUs.
Going by previous leakage, BMG G10 is the heftier GPU and was labeled as the ‘enthusiast’ chip of the Battlemage range, so that certainly isn’t lower-end. This should be the successor to Intel’s current A700 chips with Alchemist, the most powerful offerings. Hopefully, then, Intel will be producing a 2nd-gen GPU to compete with some of the best graphics cards from Nvidia or AMD.
Schilling was asked on X (formerly Twitter) to give us an indication of the size of the chip, but predictably wouldn’t elaborate on that (bigger die sizes correspond to more powerful GPUs, of course).
The other notable nugget here is that with the initial test runs only just beginning on Battlemage, that suggests the 2nd-gen graphics cards won’t be debuting until later in 2024 (in the second half of the year).
However long we have to wait, though, if Intel is going to produce a full stack of products – from enthusiast to budget GPUs – with Battlemage, that’s great news. If nothing happens in testing and further development to cause BMG G10 to be ditched between now and later next year, of course.
There’s also the possibility of further delays, too. Remember that Battlemage was originally supposed to be released this year (indeed, going by the grapevine in the past, Intel’s intention was to have these 2nd-gen cards out by now).
