Intel Arc Roadmap Leak Raises Question Over Future Gaming GPUs

People have been inferring and implying the death of Intel's Arc graphics brand since before the first Arc GPUs even hit store shelves. After Alchemist was released to a lukewarm reception, people insisted that Battlemage wouldn't come out. Now, we're seeing the same sort of thing said about Intel's "Celestial" gaming GPUs, but this time it might be a little bit more credible.

Today's doom and gloom comes from Jaykihn, who has become something akin to an oracle of Intel leaks. He presented a rough timeline of Intel's upcoming releases, primarily focused on server and datacenter hardware including the Coral Rapids Xeon CPUs as well as the Crescent Island Xe3P-based GPUs. However, when asked by X user Pehdrew about discrete GPUs, he said "No gaming GPUs." See for yourself:


Jaykihn's reliability might be in question to some; after all, he stated that the BMG-G31 "Big Battlemage" GPU was dead early last year before it finally came out later in the year. However, we and many other sites missed the later clarification, that what he meant was "the retail product," i.e. the Arc Gaming version of that GPU. Indeed, Intel seems to have no plans to launch a BMG-G31-based "Arc B770" or similar product, unfortunately for gamers.

And so, too, it seems might be the case for Celestial as well. Pehdrew replies to ask if Arc is dead, and Jaykihn responds that Arc is "fine", and only the Xe3p models were cancelled. He also says that his knowledge only spans a couple of years, which he calls "a drop in the bucket for product lines" and admits that he doesn't know anything about the next-generation gaming GPU's architecture; it could be Celestial, or it could be Xe4.


It would be a shame to see Intel skip the gaming GPU market for at least one generation, but the death of Arc as a brand was never really on the table, most likely. Arc is used as the branding for Intel's high-end integrated GPUs, which it will assuredly keep producing. Still, Battlemage and the Arc B-series are great; we said in our original review of the Arc B580 that we were hopeful for a bigger follow-up. The B580 is simply not a very big GPU and a larger chip could have been a real performance contender in the mid-range.

Hopefully this decision was made due to the prevailing market conditions; that is, due to the RAMmageddon that is still ongoing. It's entirely possible that supply constraints have simply made gaming GPUs too low-margin for Intel to bother with at this time. If that's the case, that's entirely understandable, but we do hope Intel returns to the gaming GPU space sooner rather than later. Speaking frankly, AMD isn't exactly in gamers' good graces as of late, and we need somebody to keep NVIDIA in check.