In a big virtual announcement tonight, Roger Chandler, vice president and director of the graphics and gaming products division at Intel, said that this is just the beginning, and that companies such as Samsung, Lenovo and HP are already
Tonight (Wednesday, March 30), Intel officially entered the video card market and launched for the first time in its history a series of standalone graphics processors (discrete) that will challenge the current video cards of competitors AMD and Anvidia. The new series is intended for laptops and is available today in leading models from Samsung, Lenovo, Acer and HP. In addition computer makers will be able to use the graphics card to accelerate artificial intelligence applications. The announcement today comes almost a year after Anvidia announced its entry into the server market with ARM processors.
Roger Chandler, Intel Vice President and Director of the Graphics and Gaming Products Division, introduced the first graphics card (GPU) family – Arc A-Series (codenamed “Alchemist” / “The Alchemist”) of Intel’s new brand for consumer graphics products – Intel Arc, announced last March, was unveiled today as part of a global virtual press conference. The new graphics cards launched from the Arc A-Series product line will provide gamers and content creators with high-quality, smooth and high-performance graphics experiences with up to 2x improvement in graphics performance compared to integrated graphics only. The same dimensions of the computer.
According to Chandler, the launch of the Arc A-Series is the first step in Intel’s wide expansion to penetrate the boiling gaming market with new graphics cards designed for all segments, from laptops to desktops (PCs) and workstations. The various graphics processors will be launched in stages, and will be integrated into a very wide range of models. The Arc 3 “Alchemist” cards unveiled today (Arc 5 and Arc 7 will also be launched during the year) can be found on Intel Evo devices and the first wave of other laptops available today for pre-order.
The laptops that will include the new graphics processors are the Galaxy Book 2 Pro from Samsung, a reversible computer from the Lenovo Yoga family, the Swift X from Acer, while • HP will offer a reversible laptop with a 16-inch screen in the form of Specter x360.
Acceleration of artificial intelligence
All products in the Arc A-Series family are based on Intel’s new Xe High Performance Graphics microarchitecture (or Xe HPG for short), which was originally designed for gamers and creators. However, it also comes with integrated XMX AI engines that will provide up to a 16-fold increase in computing power to complete inference operations using artificial intelligence, compared to graphics cards separate from the processor.
The products also contain the Xe Media Engine, which supports the acceleration of the widest array of decoding components and video standards, and includes coding and decoding accelerated AV1 hardware. AV1 is up to 50% more efficient than the most common encoding today, H.264, and 30% more efficient than H.265.2
And the Xe HPG display engine is ready for high-resolution, high-refresh HDR monitors, and supports new standards including Display Port 2 for a 4K display at 120 Hz without compression.
Combining Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in Games – The Intel Game Dev AI Toolkit provides a range of capabilities based on artificial intelligence, from creating a world in MatteWars to visualizing object-style gameplay transfers in real time.
Intel is working with its developer partners to grow a growing portfolio of games and multimedia applications optimized and available to Arc customers.
Anvidia did not respond to Chiportal’s request for the new competition.