Intel teases Arc Battlemage professional GPUs for Computex — Variants with 24GB of VRAM alleged

Intel is gearing up to launch new Arc professional GPUs, with a recent teaser strongly suggesting these will be based on the firm's latest Battlemage (Xe2) architecture. Set to debut at Computex, these GPUs should, at minimum, offer a slight increase in memory capacities. Specifications and other technical details remain unknown, but we can expect to learn more from Intel at Taipei.

Intel's Battlemage family currently employs one die, BMG-G21, powering both the Arc B570 and Arc B580 GPUs. Rumors have alluded to several other configurations, with the most persistent being a larger BMG-G31 die, which has surfaced numerous times in shipping manifests. The majority of these shipments are destined for Vietnam, which is home to several OSAT companies that assemble, package, and test silicon. Export data alone isn't enough to confirm whether a BMG-G31-based SKU is still being developed, so we're treating this with significant skepticism.

Rumors of Battlemage-based professional cards with 24GB of VRAM have been afloat since last December. Likewise, a recent slip-up from an OEM indicated that Intel had a 24GB B580 model in the pipeline. If we put two and two together, at least one GPU from the Battlemage professional lineup is expected to employ the BMG-G21 die with twelve 16Gb GDDR6 modules arranged in a clamshell configuration. Other specifications should remain largely similar to the Arc B580.

It's important to remember that Intel's BMG-G21 die is still positioned as a lower-end offering, designed to compete in the same segment as Nvidia's RTX 4060 (AD107). With just 20 Xe cores (2,560 shaders), cards based on this design are unlikely to match the RTX PRO 4000 Blackwell, at least in compute, with a similar 24GB configuration but a much more powerful GB203 chip under the hood. But for purely VRAM-capacity bound tasks dealing with high-resolution textures, scientific imaging, and inferencing LLMs (Large Language Models), Intel's Battlemage Pro series has the potential to offer a superior price-to-performance ratio, but that will depend on what Intel's price tags are.

The effects of dropping out of the enthusiast segment are also visible with AMD, with rumors suggesting their upcoming RDNA 4-based Radeon Pro W9000 GPUs will see a decrease in VRAM from 48GB to 32GB. With the rumored 24GB BMG-G21 GPU, Battlemage Pro looks strong on memory capacity. The big question is whether Intel will offer a higher-performance option for compute-heavy tasks, possibly with a model based on the BMG-G31 die? Let's wait for the official reveal to find out.

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