Intel's return to the GPU world isn't going exactly to plan.
Officially abandoned in May 2010, after several months at a standstill, the Larrabee project sounded the death knell for Intel's GPU ambitions... that is, until the American group announced its return in March 2022 with the Alchemist architecture and the Arc brand. This architecture produced satisfactory results, given Intel's lack of experience in the field and the enormous pressure exerted by its two main competitors, AMD and NVIDIA. Arc Alchemist graphics cards were obviously no match for the best GeForce and Radeon, but they did offer an interesting price/performance ratio. Two years later, Arc Battlemage, the second generation, followed suit.
Intel didn't lose out, but its cards remained confined to the entry-level segment, which sold the highest volumes but didn't generate significant profits. Intel's plans were clear, and four architectures were to follow in four years: Alchemist, Battlemage, Celestial and Druid. For the first two, only the interval was not respected - it almost doubled. Today, however, there's every reason to believe that there'll be no question of respecting anything at all. A well-known informant, Jaykhin, explained that " Celestial was abandoned some time ago ". Worse still, Jaykhin went on to say that " Druid is uncertain ".
Intel is still considering Arc Celestial GPU cores, but for iGPUs © Intel
This double piece of information sounds like an admission of weakness on the part of Intel, which no longer feels able to assert itself in the dedicated graphics card sector. Yes, because let's not forget that we're only talking about dedicated graphics cards here. The Celestial and Druid generations are indeed planned by Intel. It's just that we're not talking about dGPUs, as they say in the industry, but iGPUs. Rather than withdrawing, Intel seems to be reorienting its strategy: graphics solutions integrated into processors are on a roll, and their performance has exploded in recent years, making gaming possible without a dedicated graphics card.
In the end, Intel is simply following a path already largely opened up by AMD, which has taken advantage of its work on home consoles and portable consoles to significantly advance its APUs, CPUs equipped with powerful graphics solutions. The Steam Deck is an excellent example, but it doesn't stop there and, despite a prohibitive price, the Strix Halo range has proved that CPUs can have the performance of fairly modern graphics cards (better than a GeForce RTX 4070). With Panther Lake and the presence of Xe3 cores (Arc Battlemage), Intel has shown that it has the means to get closer to AMD, and Xe3P cores (Arc Celestial architecture) should make things even easier: we'll have to wait for Nova Lake to benefit from this.
