A pair of SiSoftware benchmark listings have unveiled two new Intel GPUs sporting 10 and 12 Xe cores, with 12GB of VRAM on both results. It's possible these two GPUs are future Battlemage graphics cards, though the relatively low clock speeds and limited core counts leave room for debate. They could also be alternative Alchemist configurations, faked listings, or even potential integrated graphics solutions. But let's talk about what we do know right now.
Battlemage is the upcoming successor to Arc Alchemist that will be targeted at the dedicated graphics card market. It will also be utilized as a future integrated graphics solution for Intel's future CPU architectures (including Lunar Lake). Intel is rumored to be targeting a Q3 2024 release date, which would line up well with this being a potential Battlemage leak.
According to the SiSoftware listings, the specs for both GPUs are seemingly unimpressive. The least-potent offering sports just 1440 shader ALUs, while the more potent SKU has 1728 shader ALUs. To put that in perspective, the Arc A580 has 3456 shaders, while the Arc A380 slashes that figure down to 1024 shaders. But there are some other curiosities to discuss. Depending on how many shaders are in each Xe-core, we end up with either 10 and 12 Xe-cores, or potentially 20 and 24 Xe-cores. Which answer is correct matters quite a lot, as we'll discuss below.
Clock speeds are also unimpressively low at just 1.8GHz, which admittedly could be due to early silicon and driver tests. The only somewhat higher spec is that both have 12GB of VRAM, which is better than the 8GB found on the A580 and A750 midrange GPUs. However, those cards use 1GB chips with a 256-bit interface, so it's still possible that these are Alchemist, just configured with 2GB chips and a 192-bit interface.
And then there's the 8MB of L2 cache. That's a bit of a weird number for a 12GB card, as Intel's Alchemist GPUs have had either 4MB or 2MB per 64-bit controller. The A750 and A770 both have 16MB of L2 cache while the A580 has 8MB, but it's not clear how chips with presumably a 192-bit interface could arrive at 8MB total cache — 2.67MB per 64-bit interface just doesn't seem likely, and such a small amount of L2 also doesn't make much sense for the future Battlemage architecture. Of course, the L2 cache could be decoupled from the memory interfaces, and Intel might have L3 cache that's not showing up in these "leaked" results, but we don't know for certain.
