ONIX has quietly added Intel Arc B580 GPU-based models to its Newegg brand store—signalling the brand's arrival on North American's e-tail landscape. TechPowerUp first picked up on this new manufacturer's existence during Team Blue's introduction of Arc B-series "Battlemage" graphics cards—soon followed up with an updated version of TechPowerUp GPU-Z; adding "PCI vendor detection for ONIX." The emerging Chinese manufacturer's Odyssey OC and Lumi OC models are currently "out of stock" on the Newegg store, but compelling pricing ($10 above Intel's baseline MSRP) has attracted press coverage.

It is not clear whether initial supplies of the two ONIX cards were snapped up quickly, but Newegg states on both listings: "this product is temporarily out of stock because of high demand, we will replenish it as soon as possible." Currently, the Arc B580 Odyssey OC 12 GB (black) model is priced at $259.99, while its Lumi OC (white) sibling goes for $269.99—note: Newegg demands a $9.99 fee for shipping. VideoCardz reckons that ONIX is competing closely with Sparkle—a veteran Intel GPU board partner—and charging less than GUNNIR for equivalent specs/fittings. ONIX's official website features a product page for an Odyssey B570 10 GB model—not listed by Newegg, but we expect it to turn up soon. Intel and its AIBs declared B570's retail availability last week.

Intel today released the latest version of the Arc GPU Graphics Drivers. Version 101.6458 WHQL comes with support for the new Arc B570 graphics card the company launched today. The drivers also add support for the Xe-LPG iGPU of Core Ultra 200H series "Arrow Lake-H" mobile processors. For Core Ultra 200-series iGPUs, the drivers add an up to 6.8% performance uplift in "Call of Duty: Black Ops 6." The drivers address an issue with "Indiana Jones and the Great Circle" where the game exhibits inconsistent performance and memory usage. "Shadow of the Tomb Raider" saw an intermittent application crash and display corruption in the game menu with XeSS enabled, which has been fixed. Grab the drivers from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: Intel Arc GPU Graphics Drivers 101.6458 WHQL

Intel today formally launched its second graphics card from the Arc "Battlemage" family, the Arc B570. This card is being launched at $220, or $30 cheaper than the Arc B580 from last month. With it, the company is looking to disrupt several products around the $200-mark, and probably even wage price wars below that mark. The card is designed to offer a 1080p AAA gaming experience enhanced with ray tracing, and the XeSS 2 feature set (super resolution, frame generation, and low-latency). Given that there is no RTX 3050 successor from NVIDIA, or anything from AMD around this price point, except older generation RX 6600-series products, the B570 could be poised to grab a chunk of the value-ended gaming PC market share.

The Arc B570 is based on the same 5 nm "BMG-G21" silicon that also powers the B580. It has 18 Xe cores enabled across five Render Slices, giving it 112 EU (execution units), or 2,240 unified shaders. Other key specs include 144 XMX cores for AI acceleration, 18 ray tracing units, 144 TMUs, and 60 ROPs. Perhaps the biggest differentiator between the B570 and B580 is memory, the B570 gets 10 GB of it, over a 160-bit wide GDDR6 memory bus, on which it runs 19 Gbps memory to yield 380 GB/s of memory bandwidth. With a total board power of 150 W compared to the 190 W of the B580, the B570 makes do with a single 8-pin PCIe power connector on even the factory overclocked parts. Intel has set a $220 baseline price, however, there is no reference design card, and the cheapest custom design cards start at $230, with an included factory overclock. We reviewed two such cards today, you can find them in the links below.

Read the TechPowerUp Reviews of the ASRock Arc B570 Challenger OC and the Sparkle Arc B570 Guardian OC.

Over the past weekend, an Intel Arc GPU enthusiast has picked up a pair of embargo-busting ASRock Arc B570 Challenger 10 GB OC graphics cards. Intel has mandated an official launch at retail on January 16, yet Redditor genxontech presented photo proof of his two Arc Battlemage purchases and claimed that their local Micro Center store had stock available on shelves. The lucky customer stated that he was not willing to experience post-Thursday shortages or dreaded price gouging over limited supply: "I'm upgrading my son's PC from a GTX 1080 and the other one is for me. I work, I don't need to scalp it."

Team Blue's Arc B580 GPU series (starting price: $249) launched mid-December and retail units were snapped up swiftly—budget-conscious hardware enthusiasts have oft complained about a lack of choice/value within their market segment of choice. The incoming Intel Arc B570 GPU family is priced $30 below the slightly more capable B580, so it will be interesting to see how the two tiers perform against each other in 2025. Meanwhile, genxontech has toyed around with the latest Arc Drivers—official software is not available until this Thursday, so mixed results have been documented: "My workstation/server/gaming rig now sees the Arc B570 as a B80. Crazy, right?"

ASRock has showcased its custom design Intel Arc B580 12 GB "Battlemage" GPU-based graphics cards at CES 2025—these offerings sat somewhat unnoticed next to a whole heap of newly revealed AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT and 9070 models. A TechPowerUp staffer took the opportunity to analyze ASRock's B580 Challenger OC and Steel Legend OC demonstration samples. Team Blue's wallet friendly pricing at launch (around mid-December) resulted in stock being swiftly snapped up—many budget hardware enthusiasts have missed out on handling the initial batches of Battlemage. ASRock's dual-fan Arc B580 Challenger OC sports a new design scheme—also featured on a nearby triple-fan Radeon RX 9070 model. An understated gray-black shroud sports a single RGB lighting strip on its top side.

The longer triple-fan configured ASRock Arc B580 Steel Legend OC model is already a familiar sight for many regular readers of TechPowerUp's review section. W1zzard's mid-December evaluation deemed this card worthy of receiving two awards: "Highly Recommended" and "Great Value." Steel Legend sits above Challenger in ASRock's product hierarchy, so the extra cost gets you an almost all-white design, a larger cooling solution and more RGB lighting zones. The CES 2025 demonstration unit appears to be a normal retail example—no big surprises or revelations to report. We hope that Team Blue and its manufacturing partners are doing their best to replenish B580 GPU stock.

Perhaps the biggest surprise at AMD's January 6 CES keynote address was the omission of the Radeon RX 9070 series desktop graphics cards, and the RDNA 4 graphics architecture. This was particularly because the CES Pre-brief slide-deck that AMD provided to press included materials about Radeon, but the actual presentation on stage lacked that content. Immediately after the event, AMD leadership, including David McAfee and Frank Azor agreed to sit down with a small group of tech journalists for a roundtable talk, and we had a seat. In this article, we will try to share what we can. The talk began with addressing the elephant in the room, about why AMD omitted Radeon-related announcements in Jack Huynh's keynote address and the company also confirmed that providing press with pre-brief Radeon info was intentional, and they knew that info wouldn't be included on the main stage.

AMD says that the 45-minute keynote address didn't provide sufficient time to properly announce the Radeon RX 9070 series and RDNA 4. The company pointed to other announcements it omitted in the keynote, such as the Ryzen Z2 line of gaming handheld chips. The company says that Radeon-related announcements, would have needed a much greater time-share in the keynote, to detail the change in the product naming (more on this later), where the RX 9070 series fit into the market, the advancements made by RDNA 4, and new technology such as FSR 4.

Intel could be working on a new Arc graphics card according to Quantum Bits quoted by VideoCardz. It's based on the Battlemage architecture and has 24 GB of memory, twice as much as current models. This new card seems to be oriented more towards professionals, not gamers. Intel's Battlemage lineup currently has the Arc B580 model with 12 GB GDDR6 memory and a 192-bit bus. There's also the upcoming B570 with 10 GB and a 160-bit bus. The new 24 GB model will use the same BGM-G21 GPU as the B580, while the increased VRAM version could use higher capacity memory modules or a dual-sided module setup. No further technical details are available at this moment.

Intel looks to be aiming this 24 GB version at professional tasks such as artificial intelligence jobs like Large Language Models (LLMs) and generative AI. The card would be useful in data centers, edge computing, schools, and research, and this makes sense for Intel as they don't have a high-memory GPU for professional productivity markets yet. The company wants to launch this Arc Battlemage with bigger memory in 2025, we guess it might be announced in late spring or ahead of next year's Computex if there's no rush. Intel in the meantime will keep making their current gaming cards too as the latest Arc series was very well received, a big win for Intel after all the struggles. This rumor hints that Intel's expanding its GPU plan rather than letting it fade away, that was a gray scenario before the launch of Battlemage. Now it seems they want to compete in the professional and AI acceleration markets as well.

Intel is significantly expanding its desktop Core Ultra 200 "Arrow Lake-S" lineup with new 65 W models along the sidelines of the 2025 International CES, but more importantly, it is bringing the "Arrow Lake" microarchitecture to the mobile space. The company is planning to launch at least 22 processor models this January, but not all of them are based on "Arrow Lake." Tom's Hardware reports that the lineup broadly revolves around the "Core 2-series" processor model numbering.

The Core Ultra 200H series consists of H-segment (conventional thickness notebook) processors in the 28 W to 45 W class, and are based on the "Arrow Lake-H" silicon. The Core Ultra 200HX series targets premium gaming notebooks and portable workstations, and consists of 55 W to 65 W class processors, including CPU overclocking capabilities on certain models. Things get interesting with the Core Ultra 200U series. These chips are based on the "Meteor Lake Refresh" silicon—an older microarchitecture—targeting the 7 W to 28 W segments for ultraportables. Lastly, there's the Core H 200 and Core U 200 series (no "Ultra" in the branding), which are based on the older "Raptor Lake" monolithic silicon, targeting mainstream notebooks.

TechPowerUp today released the latest update to TechPowerUp GPU-Z, the graphics sub-system information and monitoring utility for PC gamers and enthusiasts. Version 2.61.0 adds support for the new Intel Arc B580 and B570 "Battlemage" graphics cards. Preliminary support is also added for AMD "Navi 48" RDNA 4. This is also the first version of GPU-Z to support detection of Qualcomm Adreno 540, 630, 640, and 642L. GPU-Z is an x86 application, although you can run it on Windows on Arm platforms, where the operating system's emulation allows GPU-Z to detect the underlying hardware.

Among the other GPUs we've added support for, include the iGPU of the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, NVIDIA H100 80 GB HBM3, A4000H, A800 40 GB Active, RTX 5880 Ada, and Tesla K40st. We've also added PCI vendor detection for ONIX, the new Intel Arc board partner, and Shangke. A crash on some AMD Ryzen systems with older drivers, an installed discrete GPU, and disabled iGPU, has been fixed. Grab GPU-Z from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: TechPowerUp GPU-Z 2.61.0

In addition to the previously unveiled Arc B580 ROC Luna OC Ultra graphics card and low-profile Arc B570 graphics card, it appears that Sparkle will have quite a few other Intel Arc Battlemage graphics cards soon, including an all-white Arc B570 Guardian LUNA and the B580 TITAN Luna graphics card.

Earlier pictured by Videocardz.com, the Arc B580 TITAN Luna is a high-end version with triple-fan design, which swaps the Sparkle's blue design with a white shroud, white PCB and white backplate. The only thing that did not get painted, and it is quite a shame, is the I/O bracket. The Arc B580 TITAN Luna is expected to be pretty much the same as the standard version, featuring a slight factory overclock to 2740 MHz.

In addition to the TITAN and GUARDIAN SKUs announced earlier this month, Sparkle is working on several other SKUs. The roadmap includes the low-profile version of the Arc B570, as well as the Arc B580 ROC OC Ultra, which is expected to come with a 2,800 MHz GPU factory overclock and 210 W TBP, both coming next year.

According to the roadmap, Sparkle plans to release the B580 ROC OC Ultra version in February 2025, and this one will be a part of Sparkle's ROC Luna series, featuring an all-white design. As said, it gets a 2,800 MHz GPU factory-overclock, which is 60 MHz higher than the Sparkle Arc B580 TITAN OC. It also has a slightly higher 210 W TBP. Sparkle included a small picture showing a 2.5-slot thick design with a dual-fan cooler. Additional roadmap also confirms the launch of the Arc B570 Low-Profile version, which will feature a lower 170 W TBP and a three-fan cooler, similar to what we have seen from GUNNIR lately.

We have already confirmed that Intel is continuing the development of Arc gaming GPUs beyond the current Xe2 "Battlemage" series, with the new Xe3 "Celestial" architecture in the works. However, thanks to PCWorld's The Full Nerd podcast, Tom Petersen of Intel confirmed that the Xe3 IP has been finished, and the hardware teams are already working on the next Xe4 "Druid" GPU IP. "Our architects are way ahead of us, and they are already working on not the next thing but the next thing after the next thing," said Petersen, adding: "The way I would like to comment is our IP that's kind of called Xe3, which is the one after Xe2, that's pretty much baked, right. And so the software teams have a lot of work to do on Xe3. The hardware teams are off on the next thing, right. That's our cadence, that we need to keep going."

The base IP of next-generation Xe3 "Celestial" GPUs is done. That means the basic media engines, Xe cores, XMX matrix engines, ray tracing engines, and other parts of the gaming GPU are already designed and most likely awaiting trial fabrication. The software to support this Xe3 is also being developed while Intel's team is working on enabling more optimizations for the Xe2 "Battlemage" architecture, which we previewed recently. We assume that Intel's Xe GPU will now follow a stricter cadence of releases, with SKUs getting updated much faster, given that a lot is prepared for the future.

Today, Intel announced the new Intel Arc B-Series graphics cards (code-named Battlemage). The Intel Arc B580 and B570 GPUs offer best-in-class value for performance at price points that are accessible to most gamers, deliver modern gaming features and are engineered to accelerate AI workloads. The included Intel Xe Matrix Extensions (XMX) AI engines power the newly introduced XeSS 2, comprised of three technologies that together increase performance, visual fluidity and responsiveness.

"The new Intel Arc B-Series GPUs are the perfect upgrades for gamers. They deliver leading performance-per-dollar and great 1440p gaming experiences with XeSS 2, second-generation ray tracing engines and XMX AI engines. We're delighted to be joined by more partners than ever so that gamers have more choice in finding their perfect design." -Vivian Lien, Intel vice president and general manager of Client Graphics[Editor's note: Our preview of the Arc Battlemage Series is now live]

Intel's upcoming Arc "Battlemage" graphics card lineup has been exposed through a recent ASRock specification sheet leak, showcasing the company's latest products for the discrete GPU market. The leak details two models, the B580 and B570, with the B570 making a first appearance in the rumor section. The B580, positioned as the flagship model we already covered, features 20 Xe2-Cores and comes equipped with 12 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 192-bit interface, capable of reaching bandwidth speeds of up to 456 GB/s. Its slightly lower-spec sibling, the B570, sports 18 Xe2-Cores and 10 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 160-bit interface, delivering 380 GB/s bandwidth. In ASRock's case, both cards will be factory-overclocked, with the B580 reaching speeds of 2.8 GHz and the B570 hitting 2.6 GHz.

The new graphics cards are designed to operate on a PCIe 4.0 x8 interface. Both models will support modern display standards, including DisplayPort 2.1 and HDMI 2.1. Intel has scheduled the official unveiling of the Battlemage series for December 3, with cards expected to hit shelves on December 12. While the B570's pricing remains under wraps, the B580's rumored $249 price tag suggests Intel is making a serious play for the mid-range market segment. This aggressive pricing strategy, combined with the card's promising specifications, indicates Intel's determination to establish itself as a legitimate mid-range competitor in the discrete GPU segment, which NVIDIA and AMD have long dominated.

FunkyIT scored an ASRock Arc B580 Steel Legend 12 GB "Battlemage" graphics card that they previewed on their channel. The card appears fairly large, considering that Intel is positioning the B580 to be an upper-mid range GPU, if we go by the naming convention of the previous "Alchemist" generation, and the A580. The ASRock Steel Legend product features a large, aluminium dual fin-stack cooler featuring a trio of fans, and what looks like a metallic, dual-tone cooler shroud and backplate combo. The PCB underneath is a little over half the length of the card, which means nearly half the heatsink's airflow passes through the card and out large cutouts in the backplate.

The card draws power from a pair of 8-pin PCIe power connectors, a combination rated for up to 375 W power delivery. Previous leaks suggest that the ASRock B580 Steel Legend features RGB lighting in the form of a large Steel Legend ornament on top of the card, and the three fans each feature RGB LED lighting. FunkyIT also showed off the retail box of the card. There's no change in the Intel Arc main branding, but attention is given to the Intel XeSS technology logo, which mentions "AI Upscaling." The XMX cores, which are the main AI acceleration hardware on discrete Arc GPUs, get their own separate branding on the box. Intel isn't just going after gamers, but also creators, and AI acceleration markets. "Play, Create, Generate," reads the box.

According to the latest information from Videocardz, the Intel Arc Battlemage announcement and launch could be closer than expected. The official announcement for two first SKUs, the Arc B580 and the Arc B570, is apparently scheduled for December 3rd, with availability and first reviews coming on December 12th.

Intel is expected to announce and launch two mid-range SKUs, the Arc B580 and the Arc B570, and has yet to give any information on the rest of the lineup, including higher-end as well as entry-level SKUs. The Arc B580 SKU has been leaked recently and is said to feature 20 Xe2-cores with a GPU clock of 2.8 GHz. The board comes with 12 GB of 19 Gbps GDDR6 memory on a 192-bit memory interface and needs two 8-pin power connectors. The price is said to be set at around $250, according to rumors and listings spotted earlier. The second SKU, the Arc B570, is rumored to pack 18 Xe2-cores, while the rest of the information is still unknown.

New rumors emerged via Notebookcheck that point to Intel's intention to continue developing discrete desktop GPUs after the imminent launch of its Arc Battlemage series. Leaker JayKihn confirmed in a comment on X that Intel is actively working on future GPU generations, namely the Arc Celestial and Arc Druid, unlike previous rumors that pointed to a possible cancellation if Battlemage underperforms. Sources say Intel is still committed to its GPU roadmap. With the Arc Battlemage series led by the B580 model, Intel is targeting the budget segment, going in direct competition with NVIDIA's RTX 4060 and RTX 4060 Ti. Price-wise, we can expect graphic cards with Intel Arc Battlemage to go around $250 (for the 12 GB model) and although the performance will not be groundbreaking, it can attract interest from buyers on a tight budget.

Since Intel has reportedly canceled all plans to launch discrete laptop Battlemage cards, Arc Druid and Arc Celestial could follow the same path. Although details regarding Arc Celestial and Arc Druid are scattered, confirmation of their development is good news for the PC graphics card market. What we do know now is that Arc Celestial models will arrive in 2025 or early 2026, which could coincide with the launch of Intel's Panther Lake CPUs. The GPUs are expected to take advantage of the new Xe3 graphics architecture (Arc B580 will feature Intel's Xe2-HPG architecture). However, given Intel's latest challenges, the ultimate success of these next-generation GPUs remains to be seen, while we still believe that the success of Arc Battlemage will be decisive for future Intel GPU development.

Earlier this week, details of two Intel Arc B580 "Battlemage" graphics cards from ASRock leaked, but there was no indication of any pricing, which lead to some speculations in the comments section. Now, serial leaker @momomo_us on X/Twitter has leaked the pricing for Intel's own card, which will apparently be known as the Intel Arc B580 Limited Edition Graphics card. The leaker suggests a retail price of US$250 for the 12 GB graphics card, which seems like a competitive starting point for what is expected to be a lower mid-tier GPU. However, this will most likely be the cheapest option on the market, since AIB's tend to charge higher pricing due to customised PCB and cooling, plus some extra bling over the Intel cards.

In addition to the pricing leak above, Videocardz did some digging and found an etailer that has listed the Intel Arc B580 card on its site, albeit without any details, for US$259.55, although the site didn't reveal the details of the etailer, beyond the fact that it's a US company. The question is how the B580 will compare in terms of performance against both Intel's own Arc A750 and A770—which comes with either 8 or 16 GB of VRAM—especially as you can pick up an Acer Predator BiFrost Arc A770 or a couple of different ASRock Challenger Arc A770 cards for as little as US$230.

HWiNFO has been updated to version v8.16, which brings several new improvements and fixes, as well as adds enhanced support for next-generation AMD CPUs and APUs, as well as next-generation Intel GPUs. While it does not specify any models, it is clear that it gets support for AMD's upcoming Kraken Point and Strix Halo APUs, as well as Intel's upcoming Battlemage GPUs.

In addition, the new HWiNFO v8.16 also improves support for Intel Lunar Lake, adds reporting of number of NPU tiles, adds support for Cybenetics Powenetics PMD (Power Measurements Device), enhances sensor monitoring on MSI's Z890, B860, and H810 series motherboards, enhances reporting of CUDIMM CKD parameters, NGU clock, and drive letter, and improves reporting of V/F curve settings, among other things. You can check out the full release notes below.

Intel's upcoming Arc B580, part of the next-generation Battlemage GPU series, has been leaked, giving tech enthusiasts an early glimpse of what's to come. Amazon unintentionally revealed the ASRock Arc B580 Steel Legend graphics card, confirming key specifications and indicating that we are about to get the new discrete GPU contenders. The Arc B580 will feature Intel's Xe2-HPG architecture, with a factory overclocked speed of 2.8 GHz. The board is equipped with 12 GB of GDDR6 memory running at a clock speed of 19 Gbps. While the core count remains unconfirmed, the product listing highlights its support for 8K resolution (7680 x 4320), and dual 8-pin power connectors. Two variants are expected: the Steel Legend revealed in Amazon's listing, and the Challenger, which has yet to appear in detail.

The leak also aligns with Intel's upcoming plan for the Battlemage series, as references to the Arc B-Series have been uncovered in Intel's official documentation, including the "Intel oneAPI Math Kernel" and "Intel Platform Monitoring Technology" files. The Arc B580 will lead the charge, potentially alongside a slightly less powerful Arc B570 model. Targeting the mid-range market, Intel seems poised to offer a competitive alternative to rival GPUs. AMD will also stick to mid-range segment with RDNA 4, so the battle of "midranges" is the one to watch this upcoming season. With support pages for the B-Series already live and public leaks increasing, an official announcement appears imminent—possibly within days. We previously learned that December is the month of Battlemage launch to steal the CES's attention for January.

Intel's discrete GPUs are close, and recent reports indicate Intel will reveal its next-generation Arc Battlemage graphics cards in December, moving from an earlier expected Black Friday announcement. Hardware insider Golden Pig Upgrade first mentioned this timeline shift, with data researcher Tomasz Gawroński providing supporting evidence through shipping manifest analysis. The December timing appears to position Intel's announcement before CES 2025, where AMD plans to showcase its Radeon RX 8000 series with RDNA 4 architecture, and NVIDIA will present its GeForce RTX 50 line. This will give Intel ample room to "steal" the attention of the tech press, who will be busy with NVIDIA and AMD during CES.

X account Bionic_Squash has confirmed Battlemage won't be Intel's final discrete graphics card, addressing questions about the company's long-term graphics development plans. Intel's future roadmap includes the Xe3 "Celestial" architecture, though current information only confirms its initial implementation in mobile chips at a reduced scale. The timeline for a full discrete graphics card using Celestial architecture remains unspecified. We are also left to wonder about Intel's approach to discrete GPU marketing push, as the company has yet to gain any significant footing among enthusiasts. In the coming years, Intel's expansion could prove worthwhile as it updates its GPUs with more performance from newer generations.

Intel is expected to debut its next-generation Arc "Battlemage" discrete GPU in December 2024, or ahead of the 2025 CES, HotHardware reports, citing Golden Pig Upgrade, a reliable source with GPU leaks. The source says that they expect "wonderful performance" for the GPU. Intel has a lot invested in its PC graphics division, across not just its two-year-old Arc "Alchemist" discrete GPUs, but also the integrated graphics solutions it's been launching with its Core Ultra processor generations. It debuted the DirectX 12 Ultimate-capable Xe-LPG graphics architecture with Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" and Arc Graphics branding, which it carried forward to the Core Ultra Series 200 "Arrow Lake" on the desktop platform. Meanwhile, "Battlemage" got debuted as the iGPU of the Core Ultra 200V series "Lunar Lake" mobile processor, which posted gaming performance beating that of the Ryzen 8000 "Hawk Point" processor, but falling short of the Ryzen AI 300 series "Strix Point."

Intel is expected to tap into a fairly new foundry node for the Arc "Battlemage" discrete GPU series. Its chips could strike a performance/Watt and performance/price inflection point in the performance segment, that drives the most volumes for NVIDIA and AMD. It is this exact segment that AMD has withdrawn from the enthusiast segment to focus on, with its next-generation Radeon RDNA 4 generation. With "Alchemist," Intel already laid a strong foundation for hardware-accelerated ray tracing and AI, and the company is only expected to advance on these fronts further. Could "Battlemage" and "Granite Rapids" go down as the most exciting products from Intel in 2024? We should find out next month.

Some of the first die-shots and annotations of the Intel Core Ultra 200V "Lunar Lake" processor surfaced on the web, thanks to die-shots by GeenWens and Kurnalsalts on Twitter. Be sure to check out our Lunar Lake Technical Deep-dive article to learn the basics of how Lunar Lake is different from "Meteor Lake." Both are disaggregated chiplet-based processors, but Lunar Lake remodels things a bit. All the logic engines of the processor—the CPU, the iGPU, and the NPU, are located in a centralized Compute tile that's built on the TSMC 3 nm process, while all the I/O controllers are spun out to the Platform Controller tile built on TSMC 6 nm, which sit on a Foveros base tile that acts as an interposer, facilitating high-density microscopic connections between the two tiles. The base tile sits on the fiberglass substrate, which also has stacked LPDDR5X memory for either 16 GB or 32 GB of on-package system memory.

The Kurnalsalts annotation provides a good lay of the land for the Compute tile. The most striking aspect of it is the CPU. "Lunar Lake" comes with a 4P+4E core hybrid CPU, but the two kinds of cores do not share a last-level cache or sit in a ringbus, unlike in case of the Compute tile of "Meteor Lake." The four "Lion Cove" P-cores each come with 2.5 MB of dedicated L2 caches, and share a 12 MB L3 cache. The four "Skymont" E-cores are not part of the ringbus connecting the four P-cores, rather they are physically separated, much like the low-power island E-cores on "Meteor Lake." The E-core cluster shares a 4 MB L2 cache among the four E-cores. This E-core cluster is directly connected to the switching fabric of the Compute tile.

Intel today released the latest version of the Arc GPU Graphics drivers. Version 101.6079 Beta comes with optimization for EA FC25, Throne and Liberty, and Delta Force. The installer download size of these drivers are "temporarily increased" in size (from around 400 MB to over 800 MB), as these are the first drivers to include support for the Arc Xe2 "Battlemage" integrated graphics of Core Ultra 200V "Lunar Lake" processors, indicating that Intel will soon retire driver payload for older iGPUs such as 11th Gen "Tiger Lake." There are no fixed issues with this release, but the company identified a few new issues as listed below.

DOWNLOAD: Intel Arc GPU Graphics Drivers 101.6079 Beta

Intel's upcoming Arc "Battlemage" G21 GPU has made an appearance in Geekbench benchmarks, offering a glimpse into the future of the company's discrete graphics offerings. This next-generation GPU, part of Intel's Xe2 graphics architecture, shows promising performance that puts it almost on par with the current Arc A770 in initial tests. The benchmark results reveal a GPU with 20 Xe2 cores, translating to 160 CUs. Notably, the chip boasts a clock speed of 2,850 MHz. Equipped with 12 GB of memory, this particular model appears to be targeting the mid-range segment of the market.

Identified by the PCI ID "8086:E20B" and listed as "Intel Xe Graphics RI," the GPU scored 97,943 points in Geekbench 6's OpenCL test. This score places it near the Arc A770 and NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 4060, suggesting competitive performance in its class. The test system paired the Battlemage GPU with an Intel Core i5-13600K CPU and 32 GB of DDR5-4800 memory, providing a solid platform for evaluation. One interesting thing to note is that, while these early benchmarks show weak OpenCL performance, Intel didn't historically target this particular API, and the final performance will be higher in actual games that use DirectX 12 or Vulkan APIs, possibly worthy of competing with NVIDIA and AMD solutions.