Intel’s Arc B580 could be upgraded by one of its board partners, as rumors about a dual-GPU with twice as much memory are circulating. In December, Intel launched its latest Arc series graphics cards with the B580 and B570. While the latter has received minimal media coverage, the former did garner praise for its mid-range performance, features that include hardware encoding and decoding of AV1, H.265 video formats with 4:2:2 10-bit, H.264 and VP9 support, along with a budget-oriented price of $249. One of the other features for the B580 was its inclusion of 12 GB VRAM, something not commonly found at this price point for gaming graphics cards. Now it appears that someone could be giving the BFG treatment to the B580, and we could see its debut next week at Computex.
Earlier this week, VideoCardz reported on a possible slip-up by Intel board partner MaxSun, who listed a custom model variant featuring 24 GB VRAM. The listing was spotted on an EEC regulatory filing and was at first thought to be a mistake of some kind. It’s also quite common for GPU manufacturers to list potential products on the EEC that never see the light of day as well. Now it seems that may not have been a mistake, nor some kind of place holder, as VideoCardz is reporting that its sources are claiming such a card does exist, but it’s not just the memory that has been doubled. It should be noted that the company expected to debut this dual-GPU custom card could not be named in the latest update, but will reveal it in Taipei at Computex. It also sounds as if this configuration will be exclusive to that manufacturer.
Per VideoCardz:
“We won’t name the partner here, but you should know that this card may be exclusive to that company. The rumor suggests that a dual Arc B580 graphics card will be unveiled next week, featuring not only two GPUs but also double memory capacity.”
Arc Pro B Series?
There is a tiny bit of confusion regarding whether this model will feature either 24 GB or possibly a monstrous 48 GB of video memory. That is due to other rumors (via Club386) that Intel could be readying a new line of Arc Pro GPUs based on the B580 die with an Arc Pro B60 featuring 24 GB of memory. It’s a possibility that this rumored dual-GPU model could be based on it and thus have its memory doubled to 48 GB VRAM, but unfortunately, on a 192-bit bus.
A tale of dual GPUs
It’s been a spell since consumers have seen a dual-GPU graphics card. One of the last was NVIDIA’s flagship GTX Titan Z from 2014 (details via TechPowerUp), which featured dual-GPUs along with 12 GB of memory and a $2,999 MSRP (suddenly an RTX 5090 doesn’t seem as expensive). Speaking of the RTX 5090, NVIDIA’s x90 product stack had also once included models with dual GPUs, the last of which was the GTX 690 in 2012, and was nearly succeeded by the GTX 790 that never made it to being released. A GTX 990 featuring dual-GPUs from the legendary GTX 980 Ti was once rumored to be in development, but it too never made it to release. It wasn’t until the RTX 30 series launched that the x90 class made its return, and by then, NVIDIA switched to a single-GPU design for it. Since then, multi-GPU setups have largely disappeared from the PC gaming ecosystem but are still often used for video editing, and AI/compute tasks.