The backdoor departure of Pat Gelsinger as CEO of Intel last December sparked a great deal of speculation about the company’s future, a future that was rumored to involve selling off some of its divisions, especially the less profitable ones.
The first major consumer-facing move following the appointment of Lip-Bu Tan as the new CEO of the blue team on March 18 affects the graphics card division, a division that still has a long way to go to stand up to both NVIDIA and AMD.
Unlike the first generation, the launch of the Intel Arc B-580 at the end of December has been very well received by both the media and users, since for just over 300 euros, it offers performance very similar to NVIDIA’s RTX 4060, and all the initially available stock quickly sold out.
Intel will not release high-end GPUs
Shortly after its launch, a new high-end model with up to 24 GB of VRAM, intended for local and enthusiast workstations, was discovered in Intel shipping manifests and driver updates. It’s likely that Intel was overzealous after the B580’s positive reception, or that it had simply been planned for some time.
However, the latest news related to this project points to bad news, as the company now led by Lip-Bu Tan will focus its efforts on the low-end segment and completely forget about the mid-range and mid-high range. This information comes from well-known X (Twitter) leaker Jaykihn, who claims that this project was completely abandoned in the third quarter of 2024.
This means those shipping manifests were likely related to test versions of a previously canceled variant. This new model would feature the BMG-G31 GPU and was expected to have between 24 and 32 Xe2 cores and between 16 and 24 GB of GDDR6 VRAM.
Does this mean Intel won’t release any mid-range models with the Battlemage architecture? Unlike NVIDIA and AMD, manufacturers that launch their most powerful models first, Intel’s policy is different. Intel’s first generation of graphics cards featured the Alchemist architecture, and the first model to hit the market was the most basic model with 4GB of VRAM, the Intel Arc A380. It didn’t go away until the following quarter when it launched the Intel Arc A770 in 8GB and 16GB VRAM versions.
With the arrival of the new CEO, it’s likely that Intel will continue with the same policy or that this generation has been a mere formality in the run-up to the Celestial architecture. This same leaker also claims that, at the moment, there’s no update on Intel’s next-generation GPUs, Celestial Xe3, the architecture that will be used in Panther Lake CPUs. At the moment, it’s still too early to talk about this new architecture in dedicated graphics, as Battlemage has only been on the market for a few months.
