If the marketing of Arc did not go as planned, Intel does not give up and still plans Battlemage and Celestial for the coming months/years.
On this day of the launch of the Radeon RX 7900XT and Radeon RX 7900XTX at AMD, Intel affirms its objective in the world of graphics cards. A world that the American company had left - with its tail between its legs, we would be tempted to say, after the cancellation of the Larrabee project - more than ten years ago. It is interesting to note the different orientations of the very big names in graphics processing. With the release of its monstrous GeForce RTX 4090, NVIDIA clearly has a technological showcase that is as impressive as it is expensive and energy consuming. AMD, on the other hand, did not want to (could not?) go into the same territory and, for its new generation of graphics cards, it is "content" with models around 1,000 euros. Yes, it's still high-end, though.
Of course, whether it's AMD or NVIDIA, the new generation will gradually be rolled out to other markets with mid-range models as early as next year and, probably a little later, entry-level versions. On the other hand, through the voice of Raja Koduri - its executive vice-president of the graphics division - Intel confirms its desire not to move towards the high-end and even less the ultra high-end. Of course, we don't know if it's a matter of will or a way of presenting things when Intel might just not have the technical means to compete with AMD and NVIDIA on the field of choice. It's true, you don't become a high-performance GPU specialist by snapping your fingers.
Still, in an interview with Gadgets360, Raja Koduri clearly stated Intel's position: focus on the performance per watt metric to achieve GPUs with a power consumption of no more than 200 or, at the very least, 225 watts. This is the power consumption recorded by the Arc A750 and A770 graphics cards recently distributed by Intel, but which seem to have trouble finding their target. As you can imagine, we are very far from the proposals of the GeForce RTX 4080/4090 or the Radeon RX 7900XT/7900XTX for which we are counting on 300, 350 or even 400 or 420 Watts.
Raja Koduri was however very clear, " performance per Watt or the ability to deliver higher performance at lower power, is my top priority ". Mr. Koduri is not shy about taking shots at competitors AMD and NVIDIA, even if he prefers not to name them directly: " There will always be someone who will tell you in a very clever way 'I'll give you more peach', I prefer to reduce the power needed ". It's fair to assume that future generations of Intel will therefore be no more able to compete with NVIDIA/AMD's Ada Lovelace/RDNA 3 and their successors.
At Gadgets360, Raja Koduri says nothing else when he explains that the roadmap leading to Battlemage and Celestial - the next generations of Intel GPUs - has not moved. In fact, Battlemage could see the light of day between late 2023 and early 2024 while Celestial is rather planned for late 2024/early 2025. Delays that will probably allow Intel to touch only the entry / mid-range which, once again, does not seem to bother Raja Koduri: " The high-end has no limit now. What is the definition of high-end? Is it 600 watts? Obviously, our partners and customers want benchmarks to boast about, and we would like to be able to offer such things. However, right now my priority is to reach our audience with a single power connector. That gives us up to 200 or 225 watts. However, with 225 Watts, if you work well on energy efficiency, it is possible to offer very beautiful things. In these times of "required sobriety" wouldn't that be an interesting argument?
