Intel Arc Battlemage Xe2 GPUs confirmed: in the lab already, next-gen Celestial Xe3 GPUs teased

Intel teased that its next-gen Arc Battlemage Xe2 GPU is being worked on right now, with the GPU engineering team moving on from the Arc Alchemist Xe GPU architecture.

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The news comes from an interview with Intel Fellow and ex-NVIDIA executive Tom Peterson with PCWorld on the ground at CES 2024, with Peterson confirming next-gen Arc Battlemage GPUs are in the works.

Peterson said that the next-gen Arc Battlemage Xe2 GPUs are on schedule for a 2024 release, with 30% of the software team already working on getting support for the next-gen GPU nailed for both discrete and integrated Battlemage GPUs of the future.

Intel has working silicon of Battlemage working in the labs, but there's not much else announced at this time. We should expect a bigger marketing push later this year, with Peterson saying "we hope we are going to see it before" CES 2025, which is a year from now.

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Intel Fellow and ex-NVIDIA executive Tom Peterson told PCWorld at CES 2024: "We are very early days in the NPU. The NPU is mostly about running low-power, always-on kind of applications. Maybe running facial-recognition, gesture recognition so for a handheld, I mean I don't know what they are doing yet but I can easily imagine lots of col use cases. Different ways of human-machine interaction would be a great one".

Peterson continued: "But medium term is game-enabled AI. So imagine that it's AI for character manipulation or character animation enhancement. I think the greater implementation of AI that we haven't seen yet is animation augmentation. There's a lot of shitty animation in games today, no judgment, but image that you put in AI and you put in relatively crappy animations and you get lifelike human animation, that's free! You are welcome EPIC".