The 2023 and 2024 Intel GPU roadmap was unveiled by Team Blu in recent weeks, with confirmation that a refresh of the Arc Alchemist graphics cards will arrive this year, while the Battlemage GPUs will be launched during 2024. Now, however, Intel has always returned to unbuttoning its next-generation cards.
In particular, the company has officially announced that the generation Battlemage will have only two microarchitectures, called Xe2-LPG and Xe2-HPG respectively. In comparison, the Arc generation was presented with as many as four different microarchitectures, one of which (the Xe-HP architecture for datacenters) was eventually canceled in the works.
Intel’s decision depends on the need for reduce the number of microarchitectures in the works in order to optimize the development of drivers specifically designed for the latter. On the other hand, up to now the Intel Arc GPUs have been affected by various software and optimization problems, which have drastically reduced their performance. It is therefore no coincidence that Intel is preparing to launch new drivers for its current generation video cards, which could significantly increase its performance in gaming.
In an interview with Hardware Luxxhowever, Intel Fellow Tom Peterson explained that “the idea behind this change in our approach is that we need to optimize the hardware for each segment, building separate chips and separating the checks of each. Now I think the really important thing is to concentrate our focus and think of our video cards as an IP and a solid and durable business”.
In other words, the generation Battlemage will have only two microarchitectures, the Xe2-LPG, designed for chips intended for mobile products such as laptops, and the Xe2-HPG, intended instead for GPUs for desktop PCs. No refresh therefore seems to be foreseen for the server GPUs of the Xe-HPC series, while the Xe-HP line, intended for data centers and cloud computing appears to have been definitively shelved.
