Saturday, July 6th 2024
Intel Arc Xe2 "Battlemage" Discrete GPUs Made on TSMC 4 nm Process
Intel has reportedly chosen the TSMC 4 nm EUV foundry node for its next generation Arc Xe2 discrete GPUs based on the "Battlemage" graphics architecture. This would mark a generational upgrade from the Arc "Alchemist" family, which Intel built on the TSMC 6 nm DUV process. The TSMC N4 node offers significant increases in transistor densities, performance, and power efficiency over the N6, which is allowing Intel to nearly double the Xe cores on its largest "Battlemage" variant in numerical terms. This, coupled with increased IPC, clock speeds, and other features, should make the "Battlemage" contemporary against today's AMD RDNA 3 and NVIDIA Ada gaming GPUs. Interestingly, TSMC N4 isn't the most advanced foundry node that the Xe2 "Battlemage" is being built on. The iGPU powering Intel's Core Ultra 200V "Lunar Lake" processor is part of its Compute tile, which Intel is building on the more advanced TSMC N3 (3 nm) node.
Source:
DigiTimes
59 Comments on Intel Arc Xe2 "Battlemage" Discrete GPUs Made on TSMC 4 nm Process
The Intel-3 node reached its manufacturing readiness milestone at the end of last year.
The Leixlip, Ireland fab is now producing high volume Intel-3.
I mean you saw what happened with Ampere, built on a last gen Samsung node. It was real cheap for Nvidia. :oops:If there was actual competition, we might have seen some of that too, but alas.
I don't care where Intel gets something fabbed, or on what node, all Icare about is more competition and a competitive product from a third player in the gpu segment. Battlemage that could offer 4070 Ti+ raster and RT, good AI performance and say $500 would get my money.
They cannot have another release like the first one. It'll need to be almost perfect out-of-the-box.
The sad reality....they cannot release RTX4070Ti performance and request RTX4070Ti money...not right away anyway.
They'll need to erase the bad taste of ARC for many.
That is just the reality and it was ARC's release...specifically ARC driver release which caused the negative perception.
I've had overall, a very pleasant experience with that card.
- Qualcomm chips are powerful. They are like Apple's chips, they use the same architecture. This laptop it's like a Mac that runs Windows.
- Comes with great battery life. Twice as much as the next $2000 PC.
- It's the future. It's an AI PC. The others are obsolete.
and maybe a dozen more excuses to promote Qualcomm. Also something that Linus showed and I guess other reviews also pointed out, is the quality of the cameras on Qualcomm laptops. While this looks like a stupid reason, buying a $2000 laptop for a $10 equipment on it, people who are on video calling/meeting all the time might buy a Qualcomm laptop just for that reason alone.
Mindshare will come latter with OEMs and MS pushing Qualcomm. As with Intel's ARC, the first generation is problematic, the second might end up as game changing. And of course we expect cheaper ARM based laptops from Qualcomm and Mediatek. And IF we see Nvidia getting in the game in 2-3-5 years, things will heat up even more.
Intel is facing a mountain of problems, Nvidia is facing a (convenient) delay in it's latest AI chip and AMD's share price is dropping like a rock. Why? I believe it's because of ARM in Windows.