A few days ago, stores leaked the Intel’s next-gen Arc B580 “Battlemage” graphics card, which should go on sale in December. And now it seems to have been confirmed, the release date has been leaked as well as the fact that there won’t be just one Battlemage card. Intel is preparing two or three SKUs. Or at least for now, because more powerful models may still be added later, the fate of those is not very clear right now.
VideoCardz has already obtained information on what the launch of Battlemage will look like. Intel will make the official unveiling as early as today, December 3. As it happens, this will be an unveiling of the graphics cards’ parameters, their technologies and so on, not a launch. That will follow pretty quickly though, the cards are scheduled to be in stores on Thursday, December 12. So it gives them a close chance to make it in time for Christmas gift purchases. Provided there are enough units in stock at that time and there are no delays in delivery.
It would clearly have been ideal for Intel to launch in November or earlier, thus catching most of the pre-Christmas season, but it’s possible that the state of preparations simply didn’t allow it. The near-Christmas release is reminiscent of last year’s release of Meteor Lake, where one could sense an effort to get the product out before the end of the year for symbolic and reputational reasons. But it is true that the Radeon RX 7000 from AMD, for example, also came out similarly late, appearing in stores on December 13, 2022.
Two models
According to VideoCardz, Intel has internally confirmed two models ( this should be information from card manufacturers), namely the Arc B580 card, which we knew about already, but alongside that, the Arc B570 is also coming out.
The Arc B570 should be a stripped down version of the same (hopefully 4nm) GPU that is in the higher end model. While the B580 has 20 Xe Cores (2560 shaders), the B570 could possibly be chopped down to 14 Xe Cores (1792 shaders). In fact, GPU samples with this configuration were leaked on the internet earlier. VideoCardz, on the other hand, thinks the configuration could be 18 Xe Cores (2304 shaders), which would bring the B570 closer to the performance of the full-fat version. Memory-wise, the aforementioned sample still had 12GB at 19.0GHz effectively, so the bus and bandwidth could be unaffected. 12GB of memory could be something the card will be able to offer as a specialty against cheap GeForce and Radeons limited to just 8GB of memory.
Information has surfaced that the Arc B580 could officially cost 259 USD or 249 USD, but it is not yet confirmed. With this suggested amount, it would cost us in Europe 285 EUR (after adding VAT). We don’t have any leaked price for the cheaper B570 model yet. An attractive price of 199 USD (once the main attraction of popular Radeons with Polaris chip) is practically offering itself, which would be 228 EUR for us. But wishes are one thing and reality another, of course, especially with price tags.
Reference Limited Edition
In addition to this, another piece of information has surfaced that there could even be three models – the B570, B580 and B580LE. But the last one is probably a modification of the B580 card and the “LE” stands for Limited Edition. Such a Limited Edition card existed in the Alchemist generation with the A770 and was interesting because it had a larger 16GB memory (besides that, its unique tratit was that it used Intel’s reference cooling design, so it was something like an Nvidia’s Founders Edition card).
The Arc B580 with its 192-bit bus normally uses 12GB of memory. It doesn’t seem very likely that the B580LE could have 24GB capacity, as that would be quite expensive (and would require a different PCB accommodating 12 chip packages). Intel can probably differentiate it in other ways, such as higher clock speeds. Or it might just be a matter of the design of the card and its cooler. VideoCardz doesn’t rule out that there will be such a Limited Edition version of the B570 as well.
When to expect reviews
The cards are scheduled to go on sale on 12/12 (probably at 15:00 here) and the reviews should probably come out on the same day. Intel will reportedly use a similar concept to Nvidia and reviews of only reference cards, or even just Limited Edition models, are expected to come out on that day. Reviews of various partner non-reference versions are then to follow a day later on 12/13 (which is Friday the 13th in December, by the way).
The fate of more powerful models with a bigger chip?
While these models use the smaller BMG-G21 chip with 2560 shaders (20 Xe Cores) and 192-bit memory, Intel had plans for an even more powerful BMG-G31 version with 4096 shaders (32 Xe Cores) and 256-bit memory. This would probably be in the B750 and B770 (or B770 and B780?) models. It is still unclear if this chip will actually come out. The youtuber Moore’s Law is Dead recently reported that it could probably be cancelled, but at the same time claimed a very suspicious bit of information alleging that the chip hasn’t had a tapeout yet and Intel was planning to do it this quarter (Q4 2024), while the card was supposed to go to market in Q1 2025.
This seems to be very likely nonsense, as the usual time between tapeout and commercial release is typically stated as something between 9 and 15 months. Thus, his entire report may be someone’s erroneous speculation or a similar mistake probably to be dismissed based on this suspicious detail. Unless the tapeout was supposed to be in Q4 2023, then the planned Q1 2025 release could quite possibly makes sense.
Sources: VideoCardz, Moore’s Law is Dead
English translation and edit by Jozef Dudáš
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