Intel's Higher-End Arc Battlemage G31 GPU May Be Arriving Soon After All
Remember when reports surfaced that Intel had allegedly scrapped plans to launch a so-called 'Big Battlemage' GPU to compete with more performant options from AMD and NVIDIA? That was in late March. It didn't take long to cast doubt on the rumor, as barely a month later, a high-end Battlemage G31 GPU was spotted in a shipping manifest, suggesting that it wasn't cancelled after all. Fast forward to today and there is yet more evidence that Intel is readying a higher-end version of Battlemage.
Otherwise known as BMG-G31, the mystery GPU that is not yet official (but probably coming soon) has been added to a beta build of AIDA64 Extreme, a popular system diagnostics and benchmarking utility developed and maintained by FinalWire. It's the same firm that acquired and subsequently discontinued Everest in 2010. AIDA64 is essentially the modern iteration of Everest with active development.
The release notes for the 7.99.7817 beta highlights Intel's BMG-G31 GPU as a newly supported addition to the utility. It also lists preliminary support for PCI Express 7.0 controllers and devices. Notably, PCI-SIG recently finalized the official specs for PCIe 7.0 as it turns its attention to PCIe 8.0, though it will be several years before the spec penetrates the consumer market (we're still barely scratching the surface of PCIe 5.0, in terms of market penetration on the consumer side).
Here's a look at the full changelog...
Assuming FinalWire is privy to Intel's plans (and we don't know that for sure), the new BMG-G31 entry suggests that we'll soon see an Arc Battlemage B7xxx series GPU, and maybe multiple offerings consisting of a B750, B770, and perhaps even B780 SKUs.
What would a higher-end Battlemage GPU look like? For context, Intel's Arc B580 is its fastest discrete gaming GPU, and it sports 20 Xe cores, 5 render slices, 20 ray tracing units, 160 Xe Matrix Extensions (Intel XMX) engines, 160 Xe vector engines, and 12GB of GDDR6 memory linked to a 192-bit bus for 456GB/s of memory bandwidth.
Previous rumors claim that a BMG-G31 chip will feature 32 Xe cores and 16GB of GDDR6 memory linked to a 256-bit bus width, for 608GB/s of memory bandwidth. Those figures work out to a sizable 60% increase in Xe2 cores and a 33.3% increase in both VRAM and memory bandwidth. Not too shabby, even though it won't be anywhere near enough to topple the GeForce RTX 5090.
