Skip to main content

Intel may be throwing away an important opportunity

The backs of the Arc A770 and Arc A750 graphics cards.
Jacob Roach / Digital Trends

However small Intel’s presence might be when it comes to discrete graphics cards, it’s still chipping away at Arc Battlemage — but every time we hear of it, the news is strictly bad. This time, a new leak tells us that Intel may not even attempt to release Arc Battlemage for laptops, and even if it does, its partners may still not want to produce the acrds.

The grim update comes from Moore’s Law Is Dead, who talked about Arc Battlemage in his latest video. According to the YouTuber’s anonymous sources, Intel’s next-gen discrete GPUs aren’t coming to laptops. References to any mobile GPUs have reportedly been erased from an internal Intel document, indicating that the cards may have been scrapped, as opposed to never having been planned.

Recommended Videos

The YouTuber quotes a few of Intel’s laptop manufacturing partners, who are, of course, unnamed. It appears that Battlemage is being kept so under wraps that even now, less than a year away from its projected release, Intel’s partners are still in the dark.

Please enable Javascript to view this content

“We have seriously not had a single brief or email about Battlemage yet. […] I cannot speak for our competitors, but I can say that it’s already too late for us to have any notebook launch with Battlemage this year already,” said one of the sources. “We already have some details on RDNA 4 and Blackwell, by the way.”

Two others are quoted as saying that they haven’t heard anything about Battlemage. One source goes as far as to say that Intel will first need to prove that Battlemage can “live up to the hype” before they will consider supporting Intel Arc again. How much of that is hyperbole and how much of it is real is difficult to tell, but this sentiment is clear throughout all three quotes.

A screenshot with quotes about Intel Arc Battlemage.
Moore's Law Is Dead

Intel’s presence in laptop graphics cards is really small, but Battlemage would have been a good time to change that. We already heard that the Battlemage flagship graphics card may have been canceled, but even entry-level and midrange chips can find a good home in a budget laptop. However, by the sound of it, Intel may not only forego releasing a high-end graphics card, but it might also skip the entire laptop segment with this release.

Seeing as AMD and Nvidia are both set to come out with their next-gen cards around the same time, Intel is going to have serious competition in the desktop market. It would have made a lot of sense for it to target cheap gaming laptops as one way of selling Arc Battlemage, and if these rumors turn out to be true, it does cast a shadow on the future of the entire lineup.

Intel’s been pretty quiet about its next-gen graphics cards, so this type of speculation is all we have. For the time being, it’s best to take it with some skepticism. The only confirmed piece of information comes from Intel fellow Tom Petersen, who recently revealed that the GPUs are well underway and may be launching in late 2024, although a 2025 release is also entirely possible.

With all the bad news Arc Battlemage has already gotten, it won’t come as a surprise if it’s delayed — after all, Arc Alchemist was a moving goalpost for a long time before it finally launched.

Monica J. White
Monica is a computing writer at Digital Trends, focusing on PC hardware. Since joining the team in 2021, Monica has written…
New pricing leak shows AMD may have been right to wait for Nvidia
An Asus RX 9070 XT TUF GPU.

AMD's upcoming RX 9070 XT is still largely a mystery, but it won't be long before it's out there, competing against some of the best graphics cards. Many are wondering about how much it'll cost, and a reliable leaker just shared the rumored pricing of the RX 9070 XT. Reportedly, it's going to be cheaper than Nvidia's RTX 5070.

The information comes from zhangzhonghao on the Chiphell forums. This leaker has previously shared claims that turned out to be true, but still, it's important to take this with a healthy dose of skepticism, as it's not being presented as a fact -- and even if it was, it's never certain until AMD itself speaks up.

Read more
Preorders for AMD’s RX 9000 series may open this month
Various AMD RX 9000 series graphics cards.

Some much-needed good news just popped up in relation to AMD's best graphics cards, the RX 9070 XT and RX 9070. As spotted by momomo_us on X (formerly Twitter), the cards have been listed on the B&H website, and although you can't buy them right now, there's a preorder date for later this month. With the RTX 50-series set to launch on January 30, can AMD still beat Nvidia to the punch?

During AMD's CES 2025 keynote, the RDNA 4 lineup was largely a no-show, with nothing but a promise that we'd find out more soon. We weren't given the specs, much less a firm release date. While we still don't know when the RX 9000 series will truly arrive, at least we now know when the preorders are likely to start.  Keep in mind that none of this is official information from AMD, so everything could still change.

Read more
AMD may have underestimated the RX 9070
Gigabyte's RX 9070 XT GPU.

AMD's upcoming RX 9000 series is still largely a mystery, but the cards are already out there -- and AMD was actually demoing the RX 9070 during CES 2025. We may not know any specs of the card at this point, but thanks to an early benchmark, we know that it does a surprisingly good job in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6. Can it really compete against some of Nvidia's best graphics cards?

The RX 9070 was available for brief testing at the AMD booth, paired with the mighty impressive Ryzen 9 9950X3D. IGN spotted it and gave it a test run in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, which has a built-in benchmarking tool. Mind you, this is the non-XT model, meaning that it's not the flagship card -- but it's unclear just how much worse it'll be than the XT variant.

Read more