INTEL’S ARC ALCHEMIST
Third player joins the GPU market
IT FEELS AS THOUGH we have been waiting an age to see Intel’s discrete GPUs. Development started several years ago, and we’ve been teased by it ever since.
Expectations are certainly high: Nvidia and AMD have carved up the graphics card market between them for decades. Intel has decided to release the mobile versions of Arc first, the A-Series Mobile, which offers a huge jump from the lackluster OEM discrete cards we’ve seen previously. At its heart, each Intel GPU uses Xe cores (replacing the old Execution Unit). These have 16 256-bit vector engines and 16 1024-bit matrix engines.
This equates to 128 FP16 operations per clock. More Xe cores equals more power. The media decode engine is highly capable and includes AV1 encoding (the first time we’ve seen this on a GPU). The software, Arc Control, looks remarkably mature too. There are five initial versions, the A350M, A370M, A550M, A730M, and the A770M. They have (in order) 6, 8, 16, 24, and 32 Xe cores. Why the names don’t reflect this is a mystery, but each one also has the same number of ray tracing units.
The A3s have 4GB, the A5 has 8GB, and the two A7s carry either 12GB or 16GB of memory. The memory bus is narrow (64 to 256-bit), but a decent L3 cache helps. There was some confusion over clock speeds, as Intel didn’t clarify what it was quoting, as it simply states a Graphics Clock. The numbers were on the low side too, from 1,150 to 1,650MHz. It transpires this is a near-meaningless baseline speed, as actual clock speeds will be much higher (phew!). Power consumption ranges from 25W to a fairly chunky 150W.
The media engine is certainly excellent, but game performance will be the real test. The two low-end A3s are available in laptops now (in Asia first), while the A550M and beefier A7s will follow this summer. So, it’s a solid start, on paper at least. Intel is slowly edging towards the graphics market, a little too slowly for our liking, but at least it’s happening. Once again, we’re left waiting for the main event, delayed until later this year.–