During these hours, Intel holds a meeting of shareholders, at which the company talks about the key elements of the strategy and future plans. As part of the event, details about how Intel is going to enter the graphics accelerator market became known – the first video cards of the Intel Arc family will come to the market before the end of the first quarter of this year.
As follows from the published plan, the first mobile computers equipped with discrete graphics cards of the Intel Arc Alchemist family will be on sale before the end of the first quarter. Such laptops have already been presented before, as an example, MSI Summit E16 Flip EVO.
As for discrete video accelerators of the Arc Alchemist series, designed for use in desktop computers, they will start shipping in the second quarter of this year. In addition, in the third quarter, the company will offer a version of Arc Alchemist aimed at professional workstations. In total, more than 50 computer and video card manufacturers have confirmed their desire to cooperate with Intel in the field of graphics.
Intel also announced the start of work on the next generation of graphics architecture, codenamed Celestial. This product, according to the representatives of the company, will be able to offer a flagship level of performance and will be positioned, among other things, as a gaming solution of the highest price segment. However, this video card should not be expected until 2024.
Between the generations of Alchemist and Celestial graphics cards, the company plans to release an intermediate solution codenamed Battlemage. It will become available in 2023 and will accompany the upcoming Meteor Lake processors. As follows from the plans, Battlemage will exist in two varieties – as a discrete video accelerator and as a tile (chiplet) as part of future generations of client processors. Talking about the capabilities of Battlemage, Raja Koduri, head of Intel Accelerated Computing, in the first case referred to “solutions for enthusiasts“, and in the second – mentioned “discrete graphics performance in an integrated solution».
Until the end of this year, Intel plans to ship more than 4 million discrete graphics accelerators. This is quite a tangible amount if we take into account the total volume of shipments of discrete GPUs during 2021 – about 95 million units. Thanks to such volumes of production, the company expects that its graphics division will receive more than $1 billion in revenue in 2022. And this is only the beginning – in the future, as expected, this direction will grow at a faster pace. Sales of Intel graphics accelerators will have to overcome the $10 billion mark in 2026.
Along the way, Intel announced the “Endgame project”, which should become something like a gaming cloud service built on accelerators from the Intel Arc family. The service should be launched before the end of this year and will enable users to access this equipment without purchasing it. There are no specific details about the Endgame project yet, and it is not clear whether the service will be aimed at developers or end users.
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