The company said its first hardware generation will be based on its Xe microarchitecture, and will be called Alchemist. Formerly called DG2, it is the successor to its first Xe-based discrete GPU, the DG1, announced at the start of 2020. Alchemist will have hardware-based ray tracing, use artificial intelligence to power its super sampling, and have support for DirectX 12 Ultimate. It will come in desktop and notebook form factors. Intel said the next generations of its hardware will be named Battlemage, Celestial, and Druid. The name will cover not only hardware, but also consumer graphics software and services, although details on the non-hardware aspects were not revealed. “Today marks a key moment in the graphics journey we started just a few years ago. The launch of the Intel Arc brand and the reveal of future hardware generations signifies Intel’s deep and continued commitment to gamers and creators everywhere,” Intel vice president and general manager of client graphics products and solutions Roger Chandler said. “We have teams doing incredible work to ensure we deliver first-class and frictionless experiences when these products are available early next year.” Earlier, AWS announced the availability of M6i instances that make use of Intel’s Ice Lake Xeon Scalable processors, and its Total Memory Encryption functionality. The performance bump over M5 instances is said to be an up-to-15% improvement for compute, and twice the networking speed of M5. The company recently reported net income of $5.1 billion for its second quarter on revenue of $19.6 billion.

AWS announces EC2 M6i using Ice Lake Xeon Scalable processorsIntel unleashes Beast Canyon NUC 11 Extreme gaming desktop kitIntel’s first foundry customers include Qualcomm and AWSIntel Q2 strong amid PC, enterprise data center demandIntel touts focus on HPC and AI with Sapphire Rapids to offer high bandwidth memory