Intel Battlemage BMG-G31 GPU Leak Hints At Inbound Arc B770 With 16GB

Intel's Arc B770 is, so far, a story of potential greatness that ultimately ends up in a blank page. We'll spoil the story for you: today's leak is yet another data point proving that the GPU definitely exists, but we've still heard nothing from Intel about whether it will actually release in any form whatsoever, and yesterday's news of an NVIDIA collaboration made many wonder if it will ever appear at all.

Here's the latest news: Intel operates a public Continuous Integration (CI) system that performs automated testing of its open-source software and pre-release hardware. The logs from this are public; anyone can go over there and read the results of the latest CI testing, but it's a whole bunch of Linux console message spew, and actually monitoring the output for notable leaks is the pastime of someone with much more free time than we have. However, sharp-eyed enthusiast Tomasz Gawroński actually did manage to spot a BATTLEMAGE device ID of e221 in a boot log.


Why is that relevant? Well, because back in June, an update to the Mesa graphics library for Linux included that device ID in a list of "BMG G31" GPUs. Device IDs "0xe220" thru "0xe223" were marked aS BMG-G31 at that time, which means that the GPU spotted in the intel-xe Linux driver log today is almost assuredly functional BMG-G31 silicon. The line above, that BAR2 was resized to "16384M," likely implies that the card has 16GB of RAM, too.

The existence of such a thing isn't surprising at this point, but it's one more data point indicating that Intel might actually still be doing something with the "Big Battlemage" GPU despite rumors of its cancellation back in March. Does this confirm that Intel will release the card soon? No. Not necessarily, anyway; we've been seeing leaks of BMG-G31 since at least January, and Intel has been characteristically stone-faced on the matter.


Still, we would be very happy to see a more powerful Arc GPU, especially as it would positively affirm Intel's commitment to the brand and the technology in the wake of the surprise NVIDIA announcement yesterday. Intel's extant GPUs offer solid performance with reasonable power efficiency and a full set of current-generation graphics features; having a third option is only a good thing for PC gamers.

For clarity, Intel did say that the NVIDIA partnership does not affect its roadmaps, and also that it was partnering with the GeForce guys on very specific products that are "complementary" to its portfolio, likely referring to gaming-focused SoCs similar to AMD's Strix Halo. It will be fascinating to see what the results of that collaboration are, but it probably won't bear fruit for years to come. In the short term, we're much more curious to find out what's going to happen with Arc B770, and whether this card's actually coming out.