Intel Arc ASIC team working on next-gen discrete GPUs
In an interview with PC Gamer, Intel Fellow Tom Petersen talks current state of Arc GPU development.
While the majority of the driver team is now working on Alchemist, the ASIC and design team is looking at next-gen. The company is pushing its efforts to cement its presence in the mainstream area, where the competitors are making ‘a ton of money’.
However, thus far, Intel Arc launch has been a complete mess. The new Arc A7 series which were set to debut this summer are still not here, despite ‘summer’ ending in just 22 days. To make matters worse, Intel has not even announced the full specs or even pricing for its desktop GPUs.
The intel driver team now working on Alchemist has already done an impressive job. The company’s only desktop Arc A380 GPU has relatively good support for games using DX12 or Vulkan APIs. But many titles are still crippled with annoying issues that simply take time to fix. This will not be done overnight.
The company ASIC team is working on next-gen which means Battlemage (Arc B-Series) GPUs which are set to launch between 2023 and 2024. A small portion of the team is already working on Celestial (Arc C-Series), most likely to launch after 2024.
We’re not going anywhere on our discrete business. And our discrete business is the basic technology development that goes both into the data center and integrated GPUs. I feel like there’s a lot of FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) out there. I’d just like to be clear: we’re not going anywhere.
The thing I happen to believe—Pat, and I, and Roger, and Lisa, and Ryan, everybody is aligned on the idea—that graphics is a critical technology to the client, is a critical technology to the data center, and we want to start competing in the mainstream area where our competitors are making a ton of money. So all three of those things are critically important for Intel.
Most of our ASIC team is on Battlemage. A small portion of it is on our future, which is Celestial. And then there’s a very small portion on Alchemist today, but they’re kind of different function sets. So like a board and, what I’ll call, chip teams are on Alchemist right now. Kind of think of it as getting our board just right, getting our BIOS just right, making all the final tuning. But the bulk of our design team is on Battlemage.
Our plan is to start here. And then we add on top and then we add on top. And it’s not a really hard strategy to understand because we’re starting with the volume segment of the market, and then we’ll grow into more high-performance segments over time.
Intel’s multi-year roadmap from last year listed Arc Alchemist as Q1 2022 product, but as we enter September, there is only one desktop GPU available and hardly any mobile, especially of the A770M series. So Intel, where are your GPUs?
