I really hope Battlemage will be competitive at least for some elements of the market.

Best option for consumers would be if Nvidia/AMD/Intel each had about a third of the market. But unfortunately, this is just a pipe dream.

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger highlighted that the market doesn’t have much demand for discrete GPUs

Oh, I think the demand is sufficiently robust. The problem is cards that cost, say, $1000 for <100 FPS.

A release date so soon and it’s still just a rumor?

Hopefully they become more extremist this time and completely drop support for HDMI.