His rocky start notwithstanding, Intel’s Arc GPUs are among the best graphics cards you can buy today Arc GPUs are finally being hailed as some of the best graphics cards to buy, and Intel is making waves in the gaming GPU space by targeting PC gamers on the very cheap side of things. Intel may not have the best gaming GPU right now, nor has it had any consistent presence among the top vendors, but with its next generation of GPUs – Battlemage, codenamed – Team Blue’s day could finally come.
To be clear, we know that Battlemage GPUs have to come, and Intel has dropped hints about graphics cards with similar features over the past year. But we still don’t know when we’ll finally get them. Or what those specs might look like. Or how much we’ll have to pay for one.
Intel Battlemage: specs
And Intel’s Battlemage GPUs don’t have any confirmed specifications yet either. But neither has Intel been quiet – to the contrary, the rumour mill hasn’t stopped churning about the hardware that these GPUs might power. Initially, leakers such as RedGamingTech expected the flagship card to contain 64 Xe cores – double what you find on the A770 we have now, and with an entirely new architecture behind it. At the start of the year, RedGamingTech revised their rumour, suggesting that the flagship GPU would ship with 56 Xe cores. Still, a massive jump over the A770. The latest rumour is a little different.
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Some shipping manifests that were leaked via Twitter by the usually reliable Harukaze5719 revealed our first concrete information: Intel Battlemage will come in two versions – X2 and X3, with X2 being the flagship. For fans of RedGamingTech, who guessed on the specs earlier this year, those grossly inaccurate.
BMG X2
BMG X3 pic.twitter.com/lr8uD3bCCz— Posiposi (@harukaze5719) June 29, 2024
X2 card is also said to come with 32 Xe2 cores (4096 SPs and 512 EUs). So, while a higher count GPU, it’s exactly the same number as Intel Arc A770, only to be enhanced by the enhancements offered by the Battlemage architecture. The next card will have 28 Xe2 cores (3584 SPs and 448 EUs).
Rumours claim that it was a Battlemage GPU – essentially DG2 but canned – with 56 Xe2 cores. Where Intel seem to be going with this generation is very similar to what AMD have done with RDNA 4: digging in at the low end of the market. But only a few months ago, the rumours were much wilder. Alongside the high-end card with significantly better specs than DG1, RedGamingTech was claiming the card could hit up to 3GHz, and would feature a gigantic 112MB of L2 cache.
But the Adamantine cache still stands out as particularly notable in the leak. This is Intel’s own cache invention for CPUs, and isn’t really dissimilar from AMD’s 3D V-Cache – basically, you put a whole pile of extra cache on top of the die. It’s a Level 4 cache in common parlance. It’s slow cache by cache standards, but RedGamingTech claims that Intel wants to pack a whopping 512MB of Adamantine in the flagship silicon, but if the entry-level card winds up being flagship-worthy like the Ryzen™ 5000 series was, the Adamantine cache isn’t going to be a thing in this generation either. Speculation, you say?
Besides the 56 Xe Core model, the same leakers claimed a much more plausible 40 Xe core model had been in the works with the same previously discussed cores, but with a 192-bit memory bus, and sans Adamantine cache. RedGamingTech reckoned this die was a real shot for flagship status, perhaps out of necessity on account of only slender profit margins likely to be afforded by the 56 Xe core model.
Right now, we have the same wildly varying stories coming from very different sources. Rumours from leakers upon leakers claimed that Intel’s Battlemage would enjoy an unprecedented spec uplift, and then these rumours quietly went away. Is this GPU 56 Xe2 cores or 32 Xe2 cores? We’ll have to wait and see.
Intel Battlemage: pricing and release date
We went in expecting Battlemage cards to land in the second half of 2024, but the timeframe’s now downright fluid. Intel has said nothing official so far.
Way back in January, Intel’s Tom Petersen said engineers on the graphics team were ‘writing software implementations for the next-gen GPUs day in and day out’, while hardware engineers were ‘already forking around into the next thing’. On the hardware side at least then, Battlemage is ready to ship. This was recently followed up by a DigiTimes report (as noted by Gamers Nexus) that Battlemage production is ramping up in the first half of 2024.
Further evidence of this is in a recent shipping document detailing a consignment of two Battlemage GPUs which are ‘design samples for RD related purposes’. And when hardware is shipped around, it can be assumed that validation is nearing completion. Moreover, Intel actually confirmed to Japanese media outlets that a new GPU was in the works, with a slide depicting 2024 as the launch year of a new GPU.
And this timeline is far from agreed by leakers, who counter with Leaker Moore’s Law is Dead that reported Intel sources as saying Battlemage was aiming for a very late 2024 or even early 2025 release, despite information leaked last year that showed GPUs launching as early as April to June 2024.
The most recent leak fits in with this timeline. ComputerBase found that Intel plans to release the GPUs before Black Friday to have them available for the holidays.
That’s where we are: Intel hasn’t said much, and at this point, we’re waiting on Intel to say more. Intel had some nice words to say about Battlemage during Computex 2024, but had nothing substantial to share. We’re now in limbo territory, waiting to see what Intel plans to do with its GPUs. Intel isn’t in a position to be alone: rumours have also claimed that AMD and Nvidia are holding off on a 2024 GPU release, instead targeting an early 2025 launch of their new graphics cards.
We won’t know anything about pricing – Intel has nothing to say on that front yet – but there’s a pretty good likelihood here that Intel will be focusing on budget midrange cards rather than flagship high-dollar beasts such as the RTX 4090 originals. That was the Arc play with both A770 and A750 (the Arc Alchemists, last generation), and I don’t suspect that it will change here, especially given that Intel’s narrative with Arc from the start has been about value, and I don’t believe the company is going to abandon that right now with Battlemage.
Assuming these specs are correct, I’d expect a somewhat higher price than the $500 or so for the top card, but only if Intel is bringing out a 56-core Xe2 flagship (again, that is an assumption based on what is currently speculated specs – a top card is pure speculation now). If I were Intel, I don’t think I’d be establishing a price/spec rumour leadership position after a year of GPU price restoration. But point to point, based on these specs, they’re building what seems to me to be a higher performance-oriented flagship. Third, based on those tiny bits about its performance, Intel is planning, I think, to pursue a higher-price tier for this GPU in their likely Battlemage architecture. I don’t know if it will be a 48 or 56 core tendril. But an RTX 4070-equivalent (for AMD) at the base of the product stack, with a 16GB GPU, is proving pretty critical in the most recent orders that we’re seeing.
Intel Battlemage: architecture
Intel calls the architecture behind Battlemage Xe2, and it’s likely based on the same Xe architecture that drove Alchemist graphics cards. We’ve also had a few leaked details about what this next-gen architecture (which we’ll assign the working name Xe Next to harbour our uncertainty) will entail. Dribs this is. Dribs that is. But it’s not much.
However, these GPUs will likely be manufactured by TSMC since Intel is unlikely to invest in a new semiconductor manufacturing technology to build orders of magnitude fewer chips than what they do. Whether this technology will come from Intel’s semiconductor division we don’t know that Battlemage will since there’s rumours that Intel’s NH-M1 grid computing chip that was requested by the US government in 2021 to combat COVID-19 will also use the N4 node. Note that there are multiple variants of this node, and some of these variants are present in Nvidia’s Blackwell roadmap which consists of GPUs for the next-gen data centre that uses the N4 node but with different variations, and Intel could very well opt to use a naked version of the node or stick with an N4 variant. Intel will use a TSMC 4nm node for Battlemage, according to a new DigiTimes report.
For Battlemage, Intel claims it’s streamlining its lineup. With the Intel Xe architecture that launches later this year, Intel specifically designed it from low-power laptops all the way through to the data centre GPUs that the company intends to build and sell. Intel’s Tom Petersen says the Xe2-family will streamline that lineup. You’ll have Xe2-LPG, which is the lower-power line for things like laptop and desktop discrete GPUs, but it’s going to allow you to scale up much further than current Intel offerings. Intel will also have Xe2-HPG, which will be very specifically built for high-performance discrete GPUs.
RedGamingTech
An internal slide (pictured below) leaked by RedGamingTech tells us that the HPG Xe 2-HPG is to feature, among other things, ‘next-gen memory subsystem and compression’, better ray tracing, and certain micro-architectural improvements. That first one is interesting. Back in 2021, Intel had a research paper published referring to the compression to work around VRAM issues with some current-gen games. The tech in that paper could be repurposed as a part of the architecture of battlemage.
Intel Battlemage: performance
So we don’t know how Battlemage performs, and the few performance leaks we have haven’t given us anything to go on. Intel has confirmed that it is, indeed, working on software for Battlemage right now just as it did for Rocket Lake. And we recall how important that was for last-gen hardware. We’ll only get an accurate picture once the cards have arrived.
With the specs, it is more likely than not that Intel will be going head-to-head with its flagship at the RTX 4070. And this will likely be a good call. There is nothing else that remotely compares for the money in the $400 to $600 price bracket, which currently represents the hottest part of the GPU hedonic treadmill. That said, if Intel only releases a GPU with 32 Xe2 cores, the RTX 4070 might still have its flagship for lunch. I don’t know.
At first, people thought the behemoth card would be the one to disrupt the Titan but according to Cruz, it isn’t. Now, people appear to speculate that Intel would hit the RTX 4080 for their flagship card instead. A likely explanation for the rumour is because the flagship card might have a similar size GPU die as the RTX 4080 because it is so huge. I believe this could be true, but even so, that doesn’t mean the card will perform as well as the RTX 4080. Intel again could add more hardware onto the cards than it actually needs, as it did with Alchemist GPUs.
It’s tricky lower on the stack. Right now we have only a leaked SiSoftware benchmark showing Battlemage in Intel’s Lunar Lake laptop CPUs. In any case, however, Intel won’t compete with the next generation of GPUs from AMD and Nvidia. As it appears on the calendar now, Intel is trying to get a few months to market before AMD and Nvidia’s next-gen GPUs come out – itself a brave play, doubtless.
Its most significant boast to date is that Battlemage offers a 50 per cent increase in performance over the architecture in the previous generation, which presumably refers to Intel’s Lunar Lake hardware, and only time will tell if it delivers similar improvements for its future graphics cards on the desktop.
At least in its current form, discrete Battlemage GPUs might never make it to any laptops at all – Lunar Lake Battlemage might be all the laptop users ever see. But until Intel says more, which it is likely to do, all the above is pure speculation.
