Intel Arc B580 GPU With 24GB VRAM Spotted, Dual GPU Model With 48GB Inbound?
If you asked us what we would want out of an upgraded Arc B-series ("Battlemage") GPU, it probably wouldn't have been "more video RAM," but that's because we're primarily gamers, not primarily AI researchers. The B580's 12GB of video RAM is more than sufficient for its needs as an entry-level gaming GPU, yet it's quite clear now that the persistent rumors about a 24GB version of the card were spot-on. There's a new wrinkle now, too, though—a further rumor that perhaps there might also be a truly wild variant of the B580 on the way.
First up, the 24GB Arc B580. Since we first heard about the existence of a purported Arc B580 GPU with 24GB of RAM on board, we expected that it would be an Arc Pro card. After all, that's pretty common; NVIDIA often outfits the business versions of its RTX graphics cards with double the video RAM of their GeForce siblings. The latest leak seems to imply that there will in fact be consumer Arc B580 cards with 24GB of RAM.
This is a screenshot of the Eurasian Economic Union's registry of products containing cryptographic technology. The specific entry of interest is one filed by Guangzhou Shangke, who operates the MAXSUN brand in China. You can clearly see that one of the entries in the list is the "MAXSUN Intel Arc B580 iCraft 24G". We should be careful to say that EEU registration is free and does not necessarily connote upcoming products, but it definitely means that someone at MAXSUN at some point thought this product might potentially exist.
While we're looking at MAXSUN EEU registrations, there's also this curious entry for a whole pile of GeForce cards including the heretofore unseen GeForce RTX 5050. That's encouraging considering the high prices of NVIDIA's graphics cards as well as the complete absence of any RTX 40 series graphics cards below the "x60" tier, at least on the desktop. Perhaps NVIDIA has decided not to cede the low-end to its competitors after all.
Of course, the real reason you clicked on this post is this rumor that comes directly from Videocardz. The site provides no sources, but claims that "one of the board partners is working on a dual-GPU version of the Arc B580." Site founder Whycry goes on to say that the card might be exclusive to this particular board partner, and that the card "clearly isn't intended for gaming." Videocardz says that its sources did not outright deny the existence of such a model, but instead said that they couldn't talk about it, so there may be a kernel of truth here.
Dual-GPU graphics cards fell out of vogue when everyone realized that SLI and Crossfire were kind of a gimmick that rarely worked well and mostly wasted a lot of power. For an interactive, real-time graphics workload—that is, gaming—synchronization becomes a nightmare, and modern games are simply not programmed in such a way that multi-GPU makes sense. There's too much hassle, having to synchronize assets in the memory of both cards and carefully manage frame delivery for even frame pacing.
None of that is a problem when we're talking about a compute workload, such as AI inference. When you have a massively parallel workload that doesn't need exact synchronization, throwing more GPUs at the problem is pretty much standard practice. So, having two Intel BMG-G21 GPUs on a single board, each with their own 24GB of local memory, makes for a compact and very powerful AI, compute, or video accelerator given the potent capabilities of the Xe2 architecture in general and the Arc B580 in particular.
In games, it'll probably just behave like a single B580. But for workloads that can leverage both chips, this rumored card could present a real challenge to AMD and NVIDIA cards costing twice as much. Unfortunately, Videocardz says that while the dual-GPU Arc B580 will be revealed at Computex next week, neither it nor the 24GB model of the card are likely to launch "anytime soon."
