It's widely expected that Intel will
beat AMD and NVIDIA to the punch with a new generation of graphics cards, and namely its Arc Battlemage lineup. Multiple leaks and rumors back this up, with the latest batch hinting at possible pricing for the Arc B580 via an early retail listing, as well as alleged specifications from a benchmark cameo ahead of launch. Let's dig in.
Last week, we wrote about Amazon going live prematurely with a listing for an
ASRock Arc B580 Steel Legend graphics card. That listing didn't reveal any information on pricing, but it did seemingly confirm that the B580 will debut with 12GB of GDDR6 memory tied to a 192-bit bus width, which if you crunch the numbers, works out to 456GB/s of memory bandwidth. We also got a glimpse of several legitimate-looking press renders of the custom cooled variant.
Now several days later, a supposed Arc B580 graphics card has made an
appearance at Geekbench. According to the listing, the Arc B580 sports 160 compute units for what should amount to 20 Xe2 cores. It also shows 11.6GB of memory (12GB) and a maximum clock speed of 2,850MHz.
Looking at the performance, it posted an OpenCL score of 78,743. To put that into perspective, Geekbench's roundup of average OpenCL scores shows the current-generation Arc A580 reaching 89,699. Additionally, older cards like the GeForce RTX 3060, GeForce RTX 2060 Super, Radeon RX 6650 XT, and others all have posted higher average scores.
That doesn't mean the Arc B580 will be slower than the Arc A580, and an earlier leak of a 20-core Battlemage GPU was seen
scoring 97,943 in the same benchmark. What it
does mean is that you should take the early look at performance with a heaping pile of salt. Even dismissing that Geekbench's OpenCL benchmark is not the end-all, be-all of performance, this is a pre-release leak with little accompanying data, such as what drivers were being used and other details. The bigger takeaway here is seeming confirmation of the GPU core count and VRAM allocation.
We'll have to wait and see if the actual MSRP ends up being in the neighborhood of $250 to $260. For reference, the Arc A580 launched at $179, so the early retail listing represents around a 45% price increase of the Arc B580. We're skeptical that finalized pricing will be as high when the B580 actually launches, but we should find out soon enough—Intel's rumored to be launching Arc Battlemage GPUs in December.