Shipping document suggests that a 24 GB version of Intel's Arc B580 graphics card could be heading to market, though not for gaming

pcgamer.com:

While Intel's new Battlemage B580 graphic card isn't setting any records for gaming performance, it does have a few things going for it: namely matrix cores and a healthy chunk of VRAM. Both of these are handy for professional applications and AI stuff, so word that a 24 GB version has been shipped for research purposes could make the B580 a real budget powerhouse.

This little tidbit was spotted by X user Tomasz Gawroński who noticed a shipping document listing two entries for Battlemage G21 cards (aka Arc B580) with an all-important phrase: clamshell. Forget seafood, this is a way that GDDR6 memory modules can be wired on a graphics card, to allow double the amount of VRAM you'd normally get.

Intel preparing B580/B570 in clamshell configuration ?32GB/20gb vram or am i delusional? Killer AI card? pic.twitter.com/d9u7tuCzBqDecember 14, 2024

All GDDR6 modules, be they from Samsung, Micron, or SK Hynix, have a data bus that's 32 bits wide. However, the bus can be used in a 16-bit mode—the entire contents of the RAM are still accessible, just with less peak bandwidth for data transfers. Since the memory controllers in the Arc B580 are 32 bits wide, two GDDR6 modules can be wired to each controller, aka clamshell mode.

With six controllers in total, Intel's largest Battlemage GPU (to date, at least) has an aggregated memory bus of 192 bits and normally comes with 12 GB of GDDR6. Wired in clamshell mode, the total VRAM now becomes 24 GB.

This is commonly employed on workstation graphics cards, such as AMD's Radeon Pro W7900 and Nvidia's RTX 6000 Ada, both of which sport 48 GB. They're professional market versions of the RX 7900 XTX and RTX 4090 respectively, which normally boast 24 GB, of course. Another Nvidia card that uses VRAM in clamshell mode is the 16 GB version of the RTX 4060 Ti.

That has a 128-bit memory bus and normally has four GDDR6 modules, for a total of 8 GB of VRAM. The 16 GB version has eight modules (four on each side of the circuit board) but since