HWiNFO Notes Intel Battlemage, Celestial And Melville Sound In Recent Update

Popular hardware monitoring and detection application HWinFO's latest release notes include a handful of very curious entries. As you'll have already guessed from the headline, they're the names of Intel's upcoming graphics products: Battlemage, Celestial, and Melville Sound. The addition of these names to HWiNFO suggests that Intel's next- and next-next-generation graphics products are entering a more concrete stage.

Intel revealed the names of Battlemage, Celestial, and Druid to us along with the announcement that its first-gen discrete graphics products would be called "Alchemist." It's been more than a year and a half since that announcement, and despite an unsteady launch, Arc is in a pretty good place now, with stable drivers and solid price-performance.

A key weakness of the extant Arc Alchemist GPUs is their power consumption, which is surprisingly high for the performance on offer. It's thought that these might be problems with the underlying architecture, leaving hope that Intel's next-generation Battlemage parts could be a major leap forward over the somewhat-underwhelming Alchemist.

Celestial is the codename for Intel's next GPU architecture after Battlemage, while Melville Sound is the successor to Arctic Sound. In case you don't remember, that's the codename for the server GPUs based on the same architecture as the Arc A-series graphics cards. We don't know much about either of these parts besides their names, but Celestial is expected to be the graphics architecture used in Intel's future Panther Lake CPUs.

The addition of support for these GPUs to HWiNFO doesn't necessarily mean much; it's probably just the addition of the hardware IDs to the application's database, allowing it to identify them as such. However, the fact that these hardware IDs was found does sort of imply that the products are still on the way, which is good news for Intel and bad news for Arc naysayers.