Intel Battlemage desktop GPUs to launch before end of year, report claims

Intel’s upcoming Battlemage GPUs for the desktop should arrive before the year ends, according to a report from ZDNet Korea. The report cites an anonymous source from a “domestic PC company” (presumably in South Korea) familiar with the supply chain for Intel’s GPUs. The report says that Battlemage graphics cards should “release before the end of the year at the latest” per Google Translate. Intel has been tightlipped about Battlemage GPUs and when they would finally launch, so until recently, it didn’t seem clear whether they would release at all.

The timeline claimed in the report lines up with other leaks. One early rumor from April posited a Battlemage launch in November before Black Friday, which is unlikely to happen since the shopping holiday is just three days away. But perhaps Intel was forced to delay the GPUs very slightly, as earlier this month, famed leaker Golden Pig Upgrade claimed Battlemage is set to launch next month in December.

Even without these reports, there’s mounting evidence from this month that Battlemage will launch soon. A presentation slide for the second-generation Arc cards was leaked, and slide decks of this sort are usually not made far in advance, implying a sooner-rather-than-later launch date.

However, the biggest indication of Battlemage’s 2024 launch is certainly two Amazon listings for two ASRock-made B580 graphics cards that went up prematurely last week. Those listings detailed the B580’s key specifications (except for core count): 12GB of GDDR6 memory on a 192-bit bus, a clock speed of up to 2.8GHz, and eight PCIe 5.0 lanes. The listings included box art for ASRock’s Steel Legend and Challenger models. These sorts of premature listings, complete with specs and images, almost always occur within two months of launch, and often just one.

Additionally, the report claims that Battlemage’s gaming performance isn’t likely to be all that competitive with AMD’s current (and presumably next) generation cards, which isn’t surprising given Arc Alchemist targeted the low-end and mid-range. Instead, ZDNet Korea’s source says AI workloads and video features (such as support for cutting-edge codecs) are a bigger use case for today’s Alchemist cards; that might be the case for Battlemage, too, if gaming performance isn’t as amazing as the report claims.

The shift away from gaming might make sense since the A770’s 262 TOPs and 16GB of memory are still pretty decent for the card’s price of ~$260; by contrast, the RTX 4090 sports about 1,300 TOPs but costs nearly $2,000. Intel may have more luck in high-performance AI on the desktop rather than gaming in general, which has been a struggle for Intel due to chronic graphics driver troubles ever since Arc GPUs were first released in 2022.