Arc Reaction, Intel Provides A GPU Roadmap

The Alchemist’s Brew Of Alder Lake and Raptor Lake

We will finally see Intel’s Arc hybrid integrated discrete graphics arrive this year in two mobile architectures, with desktop versions arriving afterwards, towards late summer or early fall.  This will be a nice revival to the market but The Register warns that while Intel’s Magnum Opus will turn silicon into gold for Intel it is unlikely to immediately change the ugly face of the GPU market.  It will appear in a number of systems, as Raja Koduri has confirmed Intel Arc has “50 design wins across top OEMs and add-in card vendors“. 

The integrated full metal Alchemist design will be unique according to the roadmap supplied, Battlemage and Celestial will be a Tile, aka chiplet, integrated on top of the Meteor Lake and future CPU dies.  Intel is not sharing their secrets yet so Arc could be far more closely tied to the die than roadmap implies, we shall see once we can get more information and a system to test.

Intel also teased Project Endgame, which will be some sort of GPU as a Service, perhaps something like NVIDIA’s gaming focused GeForce Now, a more business focused solution for HPC or maybe a bit of both.  There are only a few more months before we will see the first of both Intel’s integrated and discrete Arc GPUs and fins our answers.