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Wellllllllll those reports of an upcoming launch for Intel's next-gen Arc “Battlemage” graphics cards in December are looking a lot more concrete now. We went over the whispers on today's episode of our Full Nerd podcast, today, a listing for an Intel B580 desktop graphics card simply appeared on Amazon on Friday night.
Uncomfortable
Videocardz found the listing for the ASRock Intel ARC B580 Steel Legend 12GB OC before anybody else. Beyond the verification of the item existing, maybe the most fascinating part of this oopsie-daisy leakage is right in the name: The Arc B580 loads 12GB of GDDR6 memory clocked at 19Gbps. That indicates Intel is avoiding the “Is 8GB of VRAM enough?!?!?!” debate that covered last generation's GeForce RTX 4060 and 4060 Ti, in addition to AMD's Radeon RX 7600. The Battlemage card's 192-bit memory bus likewise subdues the tiny 128-bit bus in the RTX 4060 cards, supplying hope that Intel's GPU might potentially be utilized for both 1080p and 1440p video gaming– unlike these Nvidia alternatives, which are concentrated on 1080p video gaming alone.
While Nvidia's RTX series has actually moved specifically to the brand-new 12VHPWR power ports, the ASRock Arc B580 Steel Legend just needs a set of standard 8-pin adapters. Each of those can provide up to 150W, while motherboard PCIe slots supply approximately another 75W, provided the B580 an optimal prospective power draw of 375W.
The IO panel for the card exposes a trio of DisplayPorts and a particular HDMI adapter. The ASRock Steel Legend includes a tidy white appearance and a backplate with a flow-through style comparable to what's ended up being typical in numerous contemporary GPUs.
Here's ASRock's quite darned uncomfortable description for the Arc B580 Steel Legend, which is so blunt it kinda makes me question if this might be some sort of scam listing in spite of it being from ASRock on Amazon:
“B-series pixel pushers, more excitingly referred to as Battlemage, will be the very best graphics cards Intel has actually ever made. Following the turmoil of Alchemist, the business has actually virtually resigned its graphics architecture from the ground up. Offering there are no unanticipated instabilities prowling in the Xe2 architecture, they ought to produce far more engaging competitors to GeForce and Radeon. That's throughout the desktop and mobile area.”
Yeah, ASRock, ideally there are no unforeseen instabilities prowling in the Xe2 architecture after the turmoil of Alchemist!
Mentioning, while this is an alluring peek that verifies Intel's next-gen Arc GPUs must relatively be ideal around the corner, it does not offer any genuine details about anticipated efficiency. The Xe2 architecture powering Battlemage initially appeared in Intel's Lunar Lake laptop computer CPUs and offered a strong leap forward in frame rates versus their mobile first-gen Arc equivalents.
I'm really curious to see not just Battlemage's real life efficiency, however likewise its rate– the first-gen Arc A580 went for a simple $179 in late 2023.
