Some troubling news about Intel’s 2nd Gen Arc Battlemage GPUs has come out. According to RedGamingTech, the large Battlemage die “BMG-G21” has likely been canceled, leaving its smaller midrange “BMG-G10” sibling to fend for itself. The BMG-G10 allegedly features 56 Xe cores (60 for the full-fat variant) or 7168 shaders (for SMT8) and an unreasonably high number for 16 ALU Vector Units.
This sizable GPU will likely be paired with >16GB of GDDR6 memory clocked at 20Gbps via a 192-bit bus. The memory buffer is backed by a massive 512MB cache buffer (Adamantine Cache) and 8MB of L2 cache.
The BMG-G10 was expected to be as fast as the RTX 4080 or at least the 4070 Ti. Its smaller sibling, the BMG-21, packs 40 Xe cores which translates to 5,120 shaders (ALUs), paired with 8-16GB of GDDR6 memory clocked at 20Gbps. There’s no Adamantine cache on this one, but it does integrate an 18MB L2 buffer to back the 192-bit wide bus.
Interestingly, Battlemage G10 was allegedly canceled for economic reasons rather than technical. Intel can’t afford to sell a high-end SKU with 512MB of cache for half or even two-thirds the price as its rivals. This was Intel’s strategy with the Arc A750 and the A770. On a hardware level, they’re on par with the RTX 4060 and the 4070, but poor drivers and an immature ecosystem pull them down a few tiers.
There’s also the matter of the process node. The Arc Battlemage family is expected to leverage TSMC’s N4 (4nm) node, while NVIDIA and AMD aim for N3 (3nm). Alchemist is quite the watt sucker, and if these specs are true, Battlemage will be as well.
