**First gen Intel ARC failed to sell.**
Intel continues its pursuit of GPU market share. The first gen of Intel ARC delivered a solid performance, with the flagship A770 being close to NVIDIA's RTX 3060 Ti for a more affordable price. It was a pretty impressive feat that these were the first GPUs made by Intel. However, all the efforts failed to captivate and convince gamers to switch from their AMD or NVIDIA GPUs to Intel ARC. A good product was riddled with software issues, especially on the driver side. Some games wouldn't work, and some would produce artefacts or perform sub-par to what was promised, resulting in an avalanche of bad press online. In the end, the ARC line-up was quickly forgotten. There were plans for the A780 model under the Alchemist+ codename, which according to the Intel roadmap, would be released this year. Still, given the low sales and constant price cuts for ARC GPUs, it is highly likely that the model has been cancelled altogether.
**A second chance for Intel**
The new rumours from Red Gaming Tech point toward Battlemage having double the core capacity on the top die compared to the previous gen and will subsequently have GeForce RTX 4070 Ti to RTX 4080 grade performance on the flagship model. This is the first detailed leak for the Battlemage, so we expect more information in the coming months.
"Battlemage will reportedly run on **TSMC's 4nm** node and see a die shrink from 406mm to around 376mm - or a similar size to NVIDIA's GA103 die (RTX 3080 Ti mobile). Along with the node and die shrink, Intel reportedly doubled the Xe core count on the top die from 32 Cores to 64 Cores; and the L2 cache is subsequently doubled to 48MB. Clock speeds will also be increased significantly to **3GHz** or beyond in relation to the 4nm node shrink. The memory bus width will stay the same, at 256-bits wide, but Intel might use faster GDDR6X memory to compensate. Gaming versions of Battlemage are expected to launch around **Q1 or Q2 of 2024**, while data centre versions are rumoured to arrive in 2H of 2024."
https://stock-checker.com/uploads/IntelArcDesktopDiscreteGraphicsRoadmap2022.png
**Future of Intel ARC**
Intel's upper management has reportedly reconsidered the viability of the company's gaming GPU roadmap. According to Coreteks (https://twitter.com/coreteks/photo), who cites an alleged source from within Intel's dGPU team:
"Intel's dedicated GPU program is being evaluated for continuance. Upper Intel management is concerned about its dGPUs' viability in a fast-changing market given its track record of Alchemist execution currently. The execution of next-gen Battlemage is already highly questionable."
Followed by:
"It doesn't take non-public information to know that we've fallen short of what we'd hoped to do by this stage. Not just because of bad execution, we have needed to catch up in some areas. But we always knew getting to this point would be a learning process, and real changes to priorities and processes are being made to correct these failures in the future."
Battlemage is most likely Intel's "make or break". My biggest concern is that Intel is late to the party. Releasing Battlemage in Q3/4 of 2023 means the internet will be full of leaks for the following AMD and NVIDIA GPUs that will release in 2025, most likely far more efficient and powerful than the current gen. Specifications look promising, and ARC also incorporates all the modern tech we have on NVIDIA or AMD GPUs like DLSS or Ray Tracing equivalents. The biggest problems with ARC are the software side and game support. Those issues must be addressed before attempting to release their next-gen graphics card. Even if they succeed in fixing the most significant ARC issues, there is still a price question that would be a deciding factor for many gamers. If Intel wants to stay in the game, it must provide us with a product that is not necessarily the best but must deliver a better price-to-performance ratio than its competitors.
**Disclaimers**
[Jakub Dominik](https://twitter.com/Hexagon90x) is a gaming and technology journalist for Stock Checker.
Image used in this article belongs to RedGamingTech.