Intel Arc Battlemage, Celestial GPUs To Continue Using TSMC Fabs

Intel Arc Battlemage, Celestial GPUs To Continue Using TSMC Fabs

Things are looking optimistic over at Team Blue.

Commercial Times (工商時報) has revealed that TSMC has once again booked in for the entire production of next-gen Intel Arc GPUs, with the Battlemage and Celestial all set to use the Taiwanese foundry’s leading edge process nodes. According to the report, Intel remains on track for development – with sources pointing to TSMC 4nm and 3nm respectively secured for Battlemage and Celestial’s production.

While Intel’s first outing with Arc was off to a rocky start – with price cuts in an attempt to clear stocks, the development is progressing as planned. Sources say the next-gen Battlemage (Xe2) is set for 1H 2024 production with TSMC N4 process (retail launch in 2H 2024), whereas Celestial (Xe3) will enter production in 1H 2026 (retail launch in 2H 2026) using the N3X node, which is a ultra performance-focused node, as opposed to density-optimized N3S or performance-optimized N3P.

Intel’s recent mentions of the Battlemage GPU goes back to the interview earlier this year with Intel Fellow, Tom Peterson. He said Intel has learned from several mistakes in Alchemist, and will be consolidating from 4 separate microarchitectures (Xe-LP, Xe-HP, Xe-HPG, Xe-HPC) into two – Xe2-LPG and Xe2-HPG. The consolidation should help streamlining the process of production and driver releases and helps with the economics at scale.

Source: Tom’s Hardware | Commercial Times

Pokdepinion: N3X node is an interesting one – perhaps Intel is looking into entering enthusiast GPU segment with Celestial generation given the node is designed for extreme performance silicon?