Intel has unveiled its first-generation marketing character and mascot for its upcoming ARC GPU lineup, the Alchemist. The company unveiled and talked about the backstory to its ARC characters that were first teased during the Architecture Day 2021 presentation last month in an interview with Hothardware.
Intel Alchemist Is The First Marketing Character & Mascot For Its Upcoming ARC GPU Lineup
Each generation of ARC GPU will be named after a fictional character from various games. The first is Alchemist and is the naming scheme attached to the first generation of Xe-HPG GPUs. According to Intel, the Alchemist name was derived from various fantasy games, including Final Fantasy XIV & Dungeons and Dragons. In those games, the Alchemist is able to craft powerful potions from basic herbs, elements, and other crafting materials.
The Alchemist will be the start of Intel's ARC graphics journey as the company also revealed the codenames for its next-generation Xe-HPG lineups to be Battlemage, Celestial, and Druid. These characters were also embedded in the presentation slide during Architecture Day 2021. The site reports that the Battlemage name has been derived from the Elder Scrolls world, Celestial comes from several fantasies including the recent Marvel Eternals movie while Druid has been a common character in the fantasy RPG/RTS universe. As you can tell, these are all fantasy and mythological characters which sound cool, and it's good to see Intel is thinking out of the box & going with more gaming-inspired names while their competitors use GPU naming conventions based on Scientists and Stars.
Currently, these characters serve as an icon for each of their respective ARC GPU generation but Intel is asking the community for input on what else could be done with them. Intel hints that they may offer ARC branded goodies such as T-Shirts with these characters and that sounds like a cool idea. One suggestion could be to feature these characters within future technology demos such as the recent XeSS showcase. With that said, you do get to see some really high-res images that you could use as wallpaper on the desktop and mobile devices to showcase your support for Intel's ARC GPU family.
Intel has already teased what its first-generation ARC graphics cards would look like and confirmed that the first products will be launching in Q1 2022. The graphics cards will be overclocking ready & performance within leaks looks to be great, especially with features such as XeSS and full support of DirectX 12 Ultimate onboard. Expect Intel ARC to offer competitive performance against NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 30 and AMD Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards.
