News Intel GPUs - Battlemage rumoured cancelled (again)

[igor_kavinski]

Damn, I hope this isn't true

Intel didn't approach your studio to help optimize the game you guys are working on, for Intel cards? Maybe then you could find out what's incoming and refute the rumors confidently

 

[NTMBK]

Intel didn't approach your studio to help optimize the game you guys are working on, for Intel cards? Maybe then you could find out what's incoming and refute the rumors confidently

If we were working with any hardware vendor, that would be covered under an NDA

 

[igor_kavinski]

NDA

Do those have a clause preventing the refuting of rumors?

 

[KompuKare]

Do those have a clause preventing the refuting of rumors?

While I have zero experience if NDAs, I should think refuting a rumour almost confirms something and provides a fair bit of information... So I would expect that any comments other than "no comment" would be covered.

 

[jpiniero]

I'm gonna go ahead and assume they just reallocated people to AI... but they should have cancelled the dGPUs a long time ago. It never made sense once they realized it wasn't going to work on 10 nm.

 

[Heartbreaker]

I'm gonna go ahead and assume they just reallocated people to AI... but they should have cancelled the dGPUs a long time ago. It never made sense once they realized it wasn't going to work on 10 nm.

Intel without credible GPU is dead in the long term. Instead of cancelling a long time ago, they should have made a serious GPU push a long time ago.

 

[igor_kavinski]

I'm in complete denial. NO NO NO. Possibly no dGPUs this year but 2025 should be fruitful for this thread!

 

[igor_kavinski]

Intel without credible GPU is dead in the long term.

Forgetting the iGPU incarnations of Battlemage/Celestial? Their GPU effort is not dead. It's in hibernation. Also, the upcoming Intel "APUs" like LNL and PTL with 32GB LPDDR5X RAM will make including an Nvidia GPU on a laptop almost moot if their iGPU performance is at least at the level of 4050 6GB.

Then there's Strix Halo. Nvidia is getting pushed out of laptops!

 

[Mahboi]

Intel without credible GPU is dead in the long term. Instead of cancelling a long time ago, they should have made a serious GPU push a long time ago.

They did. They just failed. Late, not ready on launch, massive dies compared to Radeon or Geforce of same performance...

 

[jpiniero]

Intel without credible GPU is dead in the long term.

The IGPs are perfectly fine for everything but gaming though.

 

[Ghostsonplanets]

Intel cancelling or post-poning their dGPU efforts would be pretty sad. But to be honest it isn't something out of nowhere. It's a hard market to breach and gain anything significant.

IMO Intel should keep IGP uArch development and go towards an aggressive cadence of IGP updates. Intel sells around 50 - 100M SoCs every generation and are the biggest GPU makers in the PC space. They have a market play here to turn their GPUs into the market baseline for software developers. They just need to be more aggresive and increase more performance (As they're currently supposed to be doing with Alchemist -> Battlemage -> Celestial iGPs in the span of a year)

The IGPs are perfectly fine for everything but gaming though.

Eh. You can game pretty well on a 8 Xe Arc iGP. Even a Iris Xe is serviceable if you game older or less demanding titles. It's a far cry from the HD Graphics days.

 

[Aapje]

Perhaps Intel is waiting with a release until they catch up with their foundry.

And perhaps they'll further debug Arc by releasing Battlemage as an iGPU only?

Hard to say with so little information as to what they are actually planning & thinking.

 

[Ghostsonplanets]

Perhaps Intel is waiting with a release until they catch up with their foundry.

And perhaps they'll further debug Arc by releasing Battlemage as an iGPU only?

Hard to say with so little information as to what they are actually planning & thinking.

Bionic had said that BMG dGPU would come this year previously. But it's possible he had old info.

BMG IP will ship this year with Lunar Lake. Celestial IP will also be ready and shipping next year with Panther Lake. So IP execution and readiness isn't the problem.

Perhaps it's a case of Intel not finding partners who want to release BMG cards for them. Which, given ACM issues, would be understandable.

 

[igor_kavinski]

Perhaps it's a case of Intel not finding partners who want to release BMG cards for them. Which, given ACM issues, would be understandable.

Jensen isn't helping matters either, with his dire threats to not supply GPUs to OEMs who strike a deal with Intel for ARC dGPUs.

 

[Mopetar]

Jensen isn't helping matters either, with his dire threats to not supply GPUs to OEMs who strike a deal with Intel for ARC dGPUs.

If he's actually doing that he's asking to get sued. No one actually likes NVidia enough to cover for them if government investigators come knocking either.

I don't see why he would care either way. Intel is in a distant third place right now and Intel gaining market share probably takes more from AMD than it does Intel.

 

[mikk]

Intel started Linux driver work last month on Battlemage dGPU, why should they do this if it wouldn't come. We might hear something at Computex about Battlemage.

 

[DrMrLordX]

If he's actually doing that he's asking to get sued. No one actually likes NVidia enough to cover for them if government investigators come knocking either.

I don't see why he would care either way. Intel is in a distant third place right now and Intel gaining market share probably takes more from AMD than it does Intel.

Were I Intel and JHH issued such a threat, I would release exactly 1 Battlemage dGPU through an OEM (at least) just to provoke the opportunity for legal action. Easy money.

 

[adroc_thurston]

Perhaps it's a case of Intel not finding partners who want to release BMG cards for them.

It's the case of money and manpower, GFX guys aren't living their best life at Intel rn.

 

[Hans Gruber]

I think leaks are wrong. Intel has made huge strides with ARC on a broken architecture. It didn't work right but they made it work. They said they were moving 2/3rds of their engineering team to Battlemage at the end of 2023. It would make little sense to pause or delay their Discrete GPU's. As others have pointed out the GPU side of Intel is greatly improving their integrated GPU's for laptops.

It would be nice to see EVGA making GPU's again for either Intel or AMD. EVGA got so fed up with Nvidia that they dropped out as a GPU vendor.

 

[Aapje]

The question is how competitive Battlemage is going to be. No point in producing a massive number of GPUs only to have to sell them at less than cost. But releasing at least one card is probably needed to verify in reality how well the improved architecture functions in reality.

 

[igor_kavinski]

The question is how competitive Battlemage is going to be. No point in producing a massive number of GPUs only to have to sell them at less than cost. But releasing at least one card is probably needed to verify in reality how well the improved architecture functions in reality.

They should at least release a 4060/4060 Ti killer.

 

[Aapje]

'Killing' it against Nvidia is a very tough assignment when even the 6600 couldn't beat the 3050. And Battlemage should be up against the 5060 for most of its life anyway.

I'd just like to see something with a modest production quantity that is good enough so a bunch of REDACTED, adventurers and such get it. Bonus points if Intel adds/unlocks some special features so it is actually the best card for a certain niche, like running AI models that don't depend on CUDA.

 

[adroc_thurston]

The question is how competitive Battlemage is going to be

Violent, untimely demise by Navi48.
RTRT perf was the only thing DG2 had going for it, but alas!

 

[igor_kavinski]

Violent, untimely demise by Navi48.

How certain are you about it? Gone for good? Or will it rear its lovely head in 2025?

Why are you calling it violent? I hate it when I have to try to decipher your riddles. What exactly happened? RT couldn't be the last straw that broke Intel's GPU camel's back. And what about Intel's "zero hit" realtime RT paper?

 

[igor_kavinski]

And Battlemage should be up against the 5060 for most of its life anyway.

5060 doesn't seem to be on the radar in 2024 so Intel has a short window of opportunity to flood the market with cheap Battlemage cards.