Intel’s upcoming Battlemage GPUs have cropped up on a shipping manifest, giving us a hint at a new naming scheme. The new series will unsurprisingly swap Alchemist’s A designation for a more appropriate B moniker to coincide with the fresh architecture.
Arc Battlemage marks Intel’s second series of discrete GPUs. While these are unlikely to compete with both Nvidia’s current and upcoming high-end offerings, they could once more be great value for users who are willing to give the relative newcomer a chance. Team Blue will have a fight on its hands, though, as it’ll face AMD’s RDNA 4 GPUs, which rest on well-established, ironed-out drivers.
According to rumours, Battlemage will include at least two distinct GPUs: G31 and G21. The former is the biggest, boasting 32 Xe2 cores linked to 16GB of 20Gbps GDDR6 memory via a 256-bit bus. The latter, on the other hand, is about a third smaller, offering 20 Xe2 cores and 12GB of 19Gbps GDDR6 on a 192-bit bus. Both chips are connected to the CPU via PCIe Gen 5 and to the monitor via DisplayPort 2.1.
Add all the performance and efficiency optimisations, such as the enhanced vector engines and larger ray tracing units, and it looks like Intel might be onto a winner. To get an idea, the brand claimed around 1.5x performance boost over the previous generation for its Lunar Lake iGPU, which uses Xe2 Battlemage cores. Performance estimates put G31 and G21 around the performance level of the RTX 4070 and RX 7600 XT, respectively. And that while running between 2.8GHz and 3GHz.
Considering the recently spotted box shipments, G21 could end up inside Arc Battlemage B580 graphics cards. Meanwhile, G31 will likely become a B770 card or B750 when cut down on to fill lower-tier products.
Aside from the expected performance uplifts, these GPUs should also get much more mature drivers, contrary to Arc Alchemist chips, which were hammered with issues initially. Intel has learned a lot from its previous GPUs, which hopefully makes for a much smoother launch. The brand is probably laser-focused on Battlemage drivers, seeing how Arc A-series are no longer getting big changes.
Thankfully, we don’t have long to wait to see what this is all about since Intel is expected to announce its new GPUs next month. In the meantime, take the above with a grain of salt.
