While we are still waiting for Intel’s ARC Alchemist to stop being a promise on paper, the rumors about the ARC Battlemage begin to surface, despite the fact that we will not be able to enjoy them for a long time. The last? Intel seems that it is not going to stay in the low ranges and will target the most enthusiastic market.
In 2023 we will see three participants in the graphics card market face to face in the interest of PC gamers who want to buy a new computer or upgrade their graphics card. In the first place, we will have the NVIDIA RTX 40, as the second participant to the AMD RX 7000 and to finish the Intel ARC Battlemage, of which we are supposed to see its release date next year.
At the moment, the Intel model is a total unknown. The only thing we know is that the team led by Raja Koduri already promised at the ASCII conference in Japan the launch of a future ARC that will compete against AMD and NVIDIA at the high end. The problem with that statement? None of the ARC Alchemist specs meet this, as Intel has not yet announced a graphics card that will compete in that space.
This would be the Intel ARC Battlemage graphics cards
Those of us who have been following the information about the return to the world of GPUs by Intel have not forgotten how a graphics chip made up of several tiles or chiplets was proposed, but interconnected through the EMIB silicon bridges of the company. We even got to see ready-made samples of that canceled Xe-HP back in the day.
Well, Intel has not ruled out the idea of continuing to use tiles, after all they have already done so in their Ponte Vecchio graphics processor for supercomputers and we have already seen how they have revealed their intention to use their EMIB and Foveros packaging technologies both in future processors like Meteor Lake and its future graphics chips
And what do the rumors say? well what ARC Battlemage will have a multi-chip configurationand therefore we will see configurations of 1, 2 and 4 symmetrical tiles interconnected with each other. Each of them will have a 5120 32-bit floating point units configuration. A figure higher than the 4096 of the most powerful ARC Alchemist. So in one 4 tile configurationwe are talking about 20,480 units. To put it in perspective, this is more than the 18,432 units of the most powerful model of the NVIDIA RTX 40 against which it will compete.
In each configuration below, it would have the corresponding amount of FP32 ALUs.
Q1: 5120 (+25% ACM SoC1/G10)
2T: 10240 (x2.5 ACM SoC1/G10)
4T: 20480 (x5 ACM SoC1/G10)The 2 tile configuration is the most likely as it currently stands.
(4/5)
— Redfire (@Redfire75369) March 30, 2022
The data tells us that we will see changes in internal organization of the second generation of Intel gaming graphics cards. Although at the moment we do not know which manufacturing node they will use. There are rumors about 5nmbut others dare to affirm the 3nm. It is also not known if we will see simpler versions with a single chip. In any case, it is more than clear that Intel with ARC Battlemage is going to go for the high end.
