Intel wants a piece of the $1,000 GPU market, targeting the ultra-enthusiast segment with Celestial
Intel is already hard at work on the successors to its Alchemist graphics cards, the GPUs set to ship in their millions from April this year. Those successors, Battlemage and Celestial, promise a lot, that much we can glean from the scant lines they have been afforded in Intel's latest Investor Meeting today.
Battlemage offers «discrete graphics class performance with the efficiency of integrated graphics» and it's calling Celestial a graphics card lineup that will «address the ultra-enthusiast segment.» And that is something its first and second-gen GPUs are most definitely not.
The Alchemist chips landing this year are designed to be competitive, to offer GPU performance on par with the middle order of the competing silicon already released by AMD and Nvidia in their respective Radeon RX 6000 and GeForce RTX 30-series guises. Reports are that we ought to be looking around RTX 3070 Ti levels of performance.
Which will be great if it truly can ship «more than 4 million discrete GPUs in 2022» as promised. In a mire of a graphics card crisis, we don't need Intel to turn up with the fastest GPU in the world, we just need them to be competitive and affordable. And, well to exist in numbers that mean we can actually buy one. Then Intel might genuinely be able to offer a way out of this mess.
What Alchemist isn't going to do is offer us gaming performance that will stand toe-to-toe with the AMD RX 6900 XT or Nvidia RTX 3090. Those ultra-enthusiast cards are out of reach for the first generation of Intel's discrete GPU venture.
The third Arc generation, Celestial, however, is going to be aiming its high-end sights very firmly on that market. Or so Intel is telling its investors.
«Architecture work has begun on Celestial, a
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