Intel Arc B580

Intel's second crack at the gaming GPU market

- JARRED WALTON

IT'S BEEN A LONG TIME COMING, but Intel's second-generation Arc GPUs have finally arrived. Codenamed Battlemage, the new Intel Arc B580 looks decidedly less powerful than the existing A750 GPU, never mind the full-fat A770 16GB card.

This new B580 board only has 20 Xecores, compared to 28 on the A750 and 32 on the A770. Even the lowly last-gen A580 has 24 Xe-cores. Well, it turns out that Battlemage brings a major architectural overhaul.

Details include much-improved mesh and vertex acceleration, along with faster ray tracing. The latter is claimed to be between 1.5 times and 2.1 times faster per XE core. Another big change with Battlemage is the move to native SIMD16 (Single Instruction Multiple Data, 16-wide) instructions, compared to Alchemist's SIMD32 units. Overall, Intel says Battlemage delivers 70 percent more performance per Xe-core.

If you do the math, a 20 Xe-core B580 should behave roughly on the level of a 34 Xe-core Alchemist chip. Of course, the B580 also clocks around 20 percent higher than before. Then there's the memory interface and capacity.

Battlemage mixes things up with a 192-bit interface and 12GB of capacity, alongside 456 GB/s of bandwidth, thanks to using higher-clocked GDDR6 memory.