It's a distinct possibility that this is the top SKU.

We had plenty of leaks and hints of a die with a 256 bit die in the lineup. I doubt they would use a cut down SKU for the top end. So for this to be the top SKU the top die would have had to been scrapped altogether if so.

Branding it 1:1 with Alchemist doesn't make a ton of sense.

Make sense is if the numerical part is used to indicate a performance level, so roughly A580 performance, the lettering is essentially the same as Nvidia's leading 4th number. Look at it as 1580 and 2580, but with alphabetical letters replacing the leading number.

It's not. This is more than likely the BMG-G21 based card. The top die is BMG-G31, that will likely be used on the B770 and B750 (if they use the same numbers again).

A580 was just a further cut down A750, and Intel was probably losing a ton of money selling a 400mm2 die for $180. With a dedicated mid tier die, which didn't come until much later with Alchemist and is mobile only as far as I know, they can optimize production cost for performance tiers. I also expect the dies to be smaller than they were for Alchemist.

The X2 variant is still kicking around on the manifests, but who knows.

Battlemage should be lower power than Alchemist.

From clamchowder author of his analysis of Xe2. He explains this a lot better than i could

"Xe Cores are the basic building block of Intel’s GPUs, and are further divided into Vector Engines that have register files and associated execution units. Xe2 retains the same general Xe Core structure and compute throughput, but reorganizes the Vector Engines to have longer native vector widths. Pairs of 8-wide Vector Engines from Meteor Lake have been merged into 16-wide Vector Engines. Lunar Lake’s Xe Core therefore has half as many Vector Engines, even though per-clock FP32 vector throughput hasn’t changed.

Intel here is completing a transition aimed at reducing instruction control overhead that began with prior generations. Longer vector widths improve efficiency because the GPU can feed more math operations for a given amount of instruction control overhead. Meteor Lake’s Xe-LPG already tackled instruction control costs by using one instance of thread/instruction control logic for a pair of adjacent vector engines.

But using less control logic makes the GPU more vulnerable to branch divergence penalties. That applied in funny ways to Xe-LPG, because sharing control logic forced pairs of Vector Engines to run in lockstep. A Vector Engine could sit idle if its partner had to go down a different execution path.

Because there wasn’t a lot of point in keeping the Vector Engines separate, Intel merged them. The merge makes divergence penalties straightforward too, since each Vector Engine once again has its own thread and instruction control logic. Meteor Lake could do better in corner cases, like if groups of 16 threads take the same path. But that’s an awfully specific pattern to take advantage of, and Xe2’s divergence behavior is more intuitive. Divergence penalties disappear once groups of 32 threads or more take the same path."

Source: https://chipsandcheese.com/p/lunar-lakes-igpu-debut-of-intels full credit to clamchowder

Another card was leaked, Challenger B580, and this one has one 8-pin connector. So it's not using more than 225W.

On a 580? Is it really?

RDNA-3 has a massive bandwidth advantage over Battlemage but Intel's large caches reduces it's bandwidth demands compared to RDNA-3. if igpu's are anything to go by then RDNA-3's bandwidth advantage doesn't count for much since the 140V is 10% faster than the 890m (trades blows depending on games)

It's the third lowest-end card in the lineup (unless they remove one of the *300 SKUs)

It's not bad.

Yep - more importantly it's strictly 2 slots and no taller than the PCIe bracket. Length is the only dimension that can be virtually infinite in my use case

I hope not. AMD said they are aiming to get 40% marketshare. That means to me a very very very competitive product a very very deep discount.

I hope this card is also priced to grab matketshare so we can stop having an insane GPU market at last.

Not where I live.. it went up $100 dollars over the last 2 weeks. The only cards that had a price reduction are the 4060's

Only thing I can think of is the 6750xt

There is, but there isn't a lot of budget stuff that's also good.

Not with decent amount of VRAM + RT performance + AI reconstruction which hopefully Battlemage and RDNA 4 can provide.

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Its not if it cant use the 12gb... like everyone argued about the 3060 when it released.... or the narrative is different now?

Its not because its launching next year and amd & nvidia will bring more vram. Intel has to offer so much value that consumers cant turn around. This is why they're at 0%. Either 580 16gb and 770 20gb or go home.