The announcement of Battlemage two days prior refuted industry-wide rumors that Intel was planning to sunset discrete Arc GPUs. After the fact, enthusiasts are already speculating about the next generation, namely Celestial. Tom Peterson from Intel AKA "TAP" joined The Full Nerd Podcast yesterday and confirmed that Arc isn't going anywhere - anytime soon with Celestial Xe3 "baked" on the architectural level and hardware teams already working on next-next-gen Xe4 Druid GPUs.
Cutting off the graphics division never made sense as that'd make Intel's mobile offerings highly uncompetitive compared to AMD, and even Snapdragon now. This isn't just a rhetorical statement since Intel's Lunar Lake can pull ahead of AMD's Strix Point offerings in gaming - putting Intel on top of the PC iGPU leaderboard after a very long time.
"Our IP, that's kind of called Xe3 which is the one after Xe2 - that's pretty much baked. So the software teams have a lot of work to do on Xe3. The hardware teams are off on to the next thing (Xe4)"
Tom Peterson at The Full Nerd Podcast
Tom Peterson confirms that Intel has laid the hardware-level groundwork for Celestial which likely includes architectural layouts and prototypes. That's sort of expected since Intel might reveal Panther Lake (with a Celestial-based iGPU) at Computex 2025 which is just five to six months away. The wording makes it pretty evident that Xe3's design is nearing completion and has been handed over to the software team for driver support and other optimizations.
The hardware team has been designated to the "next-thing" which most probably refers to Druid or Xe4 GPUs. As far as Intel's CPU lineup goes, Druid might be featured on Nova Lake but that's speculation because Intel hasn't formally announced a successor to Panther Lake. Tom mentions that Arc GPUs have a development lifecycle that may sometimes exceed one year so Celestial - at least on desktop - will probably not hit shelves until 2026.
There is still no official confirmation from Intel regarding faster Battlemage GPUs - namely the B750 and B770. Word on the street is that these GPUs might have been axed and that makes sense because any Intel GPU in the $350+ price bracket will struggle against next-gen offerings from Nvidia and AMD - due to consumer mindshare and market sentiment.
