Intel may be throwing away an important opportunity

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. 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. “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. 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. AMD’s RX 9000 series is almost here, ready to battle it out against some of the best graphics cards. Not a day goes by without some new leaks about the cards’ performance or price. Today, we got some scoop on the former from a reliable leaker on X (formerly Twitter). While pretty vague — as these things often are — the leak implies that some of the predictions we’ve already heard about the RX 9070 may have been wrong. The latest update on RDNA 4 comes from momomo_us on X. This is a reliable leaker with a good track record for GPU and CPU news, but as always, take the following with some skepticism. The disappointing “paper launch” continues. Nvidia’s RTX 5070 Ti is just a couple of days away from launch, but whether it’ll actually be readily available is another thing entirely. Although it could rival some of the best graphics cards, the GPU is said to be hard to come by, much like the RTX 5090 and the RTX 5080. It appears that my worries might be about to come true — the RTX 5070 Ti will only be available on paper and not in reality, at least if this new leak is to be believed. Channel Gate shared an update on the predicted pricing and stock levels for the RTX 5070 Ti, and it’s grim news all around. Over a month after the initial announcement at CES 2025 (if you can even call it an announcement), we still don’t know much about the future of AMD’s RDNA 4 lineup. We know the cards are set to launch sometime in March, but their specs remain a mystery. However, there’s an even bigger secret that’s still yet to be revealed: The pricing. After a bumpy lead-up to the launch of the RX 9000 series, pricing is the one thing that AMD needs to get right. The latest leaks imply that AMD will price the cards “very aggressively,” which could be good news — but it might still not be enough for it to rival some of the best graphics cards.
A careful approach to pricing