Intel Arc Battlemage X3 GPU Spotted With 448 EUs And 256-Bit Memory Bus

Most enthusiasts seem to treat currently-available Intel Arc graphics parts as viable, budget-friendly options. This isn't entirely fair, but we get it—a less-than-perfect launch and positioning in the lower echelons of the market left many people unenthusiastic about Intel's discrete GPUs. However, it might be time to start getting excited about the company's second-generation efforts.

The codename for Intel's next-gen discrete GPUs is "Battlemage". This refers to multiple discrete graphics parts built using Intel's "Xe2" GPU architecture. How many? Well, we're not sure yet, but we're aware of at least two different chips, with a third one possibly canceled. Keep in mind that everything we're about to discuss is almost entirely speculation based on leaks and rumors. With that said, here we go:


With Alchemist, the first-gen parts, Intel named the GPUs simply: ACM-G10, ACM-G11, and ACM-G12. We heard similar things for Battlemage, originally; the first GPU anyone heard of was the BMG-G10. However, that part seems to be canceled in favor of what people are now referring to as "BMG X2" and "BMG X3". We've seen evidence that these parts actually exist in shipping logs like the above.

In these shipping logs, we see mention of a "448 EU" GPU, but we actually think this is misleading. On an Alchemist design, 448 EUs would translate to 56 Xe2 Cores, but we're not quite sure that's right for Battlemage. Intel itself leaked a listing for a "BGA3283-BMG-G31 VRTT Interposer" on its Design Tools Store. Given the "Internal Only" part of the listing, we have to assume that was an error, but either way, it confirms that the "BMG" naming scheme is indeed still in use.


The interesting part is the pin count there of 3,283 pins. This is only a bit more than used by the Alchemist ACM-G10 GPU, and those are probably required for enablement of PCIe 5.0, as Battlemage is rumored to be the first PCIe 5.0 GPU. Based on information collected by the community, it seems like the BMG-G31 chip will include 32 Xe Cores, just like with the Arc A770.

However, we learned from Intel's presentation at Computex that each SIMD unit inside each Xe Vector Engine is twice as wide on Xe2 as it was on the original architecture, yet the Xe Vector Engine itself has retained the same width. In other words, you end up with half the number of XVEs or EUs per Xe Core.


According to known leaker Bionic_Squash, Intel actually uses SIMD8 EU counts in its internal documents for the sake of consistency. If that's true, then this "448 EU" is actually 224 Xe2 Vector Engines, or indeed, 28 Xe2 EUs. It's confusing, but that basically means that what we're looking at with BMG-X3 is a Xe2-based rough equivalent of the Arc A750.