Wellllllllll, those rumors about an upcoming December launch of Intel’s next generation Arc “Battlemage” graphics cards are looking a lot more concrete now. We discussed the whispers on this week’s episode of our Full Nerd podcast, but now a listing for an Intel B580 desktop graphics card appeared on Amazon on Friday evening.
Uncomfortable.
Videocardz was the first to discover the offer for the ASRock Intel ARC B580 Steel Legend 12GB OC. Besides confirming that the product exists, perhaps the most interesting part of this oopsie-daisy leak is in the name: the Arc B580 includes 12 GB of GDDR6 memory, clocked at 19 Gbps. That means Intel answers the question “Is 8 GB of VRAM enough?!?!?!” controversy that enveloped the previous generation GeForce RTX 4060 and 4060 Ti, as well as AMD’s Radeon RX 7600. The Battlemage card’s 192-bit memory bus also overpowers the tiny 128-bit bus in the RTX 4060 cards, giving hope that Intel’s GPU could potentially have been used for both 1080p and 1440p gaming – unlike these Nvidia options, which only focus on 1080p gaming.
While Nvidia’s RTX series has switched exclusively to the new 12VHPWR power connectors, the ASRock Arc B580 Steel Legend only requires a pair of traditional 8-pin connectors. Each of these can deliver up to 150W, while PCIe slots for the motherboard deliver a further 75W, given the B580’s maximum potential power consumption of 375W.
The IO panel for the card reveals a trio of DisplayPorts and a single HDMI connector. The ASRock Steel Legend features a sleek white appearance and a backplate with a flow-through design, similar to what has become common in many modern GPUs.
Here’s the one from ASRock Also pretty tricky description for the Arc B580 Steel Legend, which is so blunt I wonder if this could be some kind of hoax listing, despite it being from ASRock on Amazon:
“B-series pixel pushers, better known as Battlemage, will be the best graphics cards Intel has ever made. After the chaos of Alchemist, the company practically abandoned its graphics architecture from the ground up. Provided there are no unexpected instabilities lurking in the Xe2 architecture, they should provide much more compelling competition for GeForce and Radeon. That applies to the desktop and mobile space.”
Yes, ASRock, hopefully there are no unexpected instabilities lurking in the Xe2 architecture after the chaos of Alchemist!
Speaking of which, while this is a tantalizing glimpse that confirms that Intel’s next-generation Arc GPUs should be seemingly just around the corner, it offers no real information about expected performance. The Xe2 architecture powering Battlemage first appeared in Intel’s Lunar Lake laptop CPUs and delivered a solid leap in frame rates over their mobile first-generation Arc counterparts.
I’m very curious to see not only Battlemage’s real-world performance, but also its price – the first generation Arc A580 launched in late 2023 for just $179. A price that would be somewhere close to that low , would indeed be a pleasant holiday surprise if the B580 manages to deliver frames at a pace on par with (or better) than Nvidia’s $300 RTX 4060. would also send a great message to AMD, while Radeon’s next-gen offerings target mainstream price points.
I’d expect a lot more information from Intel sooner rather than later if this appears on Amazon’s US storefront at all. You can see our previous Full Nerd discussion on Battlemage rumors starting at the 37:30 mark in the video below.