After years of built-in graphics processing units, Intel officially unveils its first separate graphics processor in the new Intel Arc series
Photo: Intel
After years in which Intel has to some extent lost its mojo to computer makers and users, Chipzilla is taking another significant step on the way back there, officially announcing one of its most important developments in recent years: a dedicated graphics card (GPU) for gamers. Meet the Alchemist (formerly DG2), or A-Series for short, the first processor of Intel Arc products.
Intel is building on a connection between powerful cores and software
Unlike the built-in graphics processing units (Agrgrated), A Series are Discrete processors, meaning dedicated ones like those of NVIDIA and AMD that can be found in powerful laptops. The new card is based on the Xe-HPG microarchitecture which is basically a combination of Xe-LP, HP and HPC. The Xe cores come with technology that Intel calls XMX, and uses AI engines that will actually accelerate all the heavy-duty graphics processing tasks.
According to Intel, this combination allows the new cards to be efficient and powerful enough to support real-time Ray Tracing, Artificial Sampling, Mesh Shading, Variable Rate Shading and all this with full support for DirectX 12 Ultimate. At this point, however, Intel is targeting Alchemist for “ultra-thin” and “thin and light” laptops. Later this year, it will also reach desktops and workstations. Among the games that will support all this goodness you will also find some huge games like Elden Ring, Ghostwire, Death Stranding, Hitman 3 and more.
Similar to video cards and other processors, here too Intel divides its various cards into different numbers and categories. Arc 3 in the A370M version will come with 8 Xe cores as well as 8 Ray Tracing units and 4GB of GDDR6 memory; And the A350M will come with 6 Xe cores, with 6 Ray Tracing units and 4GB of GDDR6 memory. According to Intel, this specification will allow us to run 1080P resolution games at 60 frames per second and are also designed for content creators. Games like Fortnite, Rocket League and Valorant on medium settings also reach 90-100 frames per second according to Intel data. Laptop prices, at least according to Intel, start at $ 899.
Intel has also announced the Arc 5 and Arc 7 that will only arrive in the summer. The 5 Series will upgrade you to 16 cores and RT units with 8GB, while the 7 will already bounce you to 24 cores or 32 cores and units of your choice with 12 or 16 GB of GDDR6 memory. As mentioned, the first laptops that contain these latest series will only arrive in early summer, while those of Arc 3 are available for pre-purchase right now. The first laptop that comes with Arc 3 is Samsung’s Galaxy Book2 Pro, but among the OEMs that Intel mentioned you will find Acer, Asus, Lenovo, Dell, HP, MSI and more, so pretty much all major manufacturers will launch computers with Intel Arc.
Intel explains that the new X cores and XMX technology are expected to boost performance up to 16 times compared to standard vector GPUs, especially when working with graphics and creation software. In addition, they support acceleration to video codecs (device for encoding and decoding), and among other things support the coding and decoding at the hardware level of AV1, which should be up to 50% more than H.264 and 30% more than H.265 in programs like Premiere’s Adobe, DeVinci Resolve and also the wonderful Handbrake – all of which support the encoder. The new processors support the Display Port 2.0 standard, which allows, among other things, support for 4K resolution and a refresh rate of 120 Hz without compression.
Intel has also launched a technology called Xe Super Sampling, which takes games with the highest settings reaching 1080P Native, and upgrades (in the upscaling process) the resolution to 4K. Intel will launch the technology in the summer with support for about 20 games, with additional developers being able to implement it via the SDK.
In addition, Intel introduced Deep Link, which is a kind of platform that connects Intel processors to the new graphics processors so that they can share the burden. According to Intel, this platform leads to a 30% improvement in the performance of creative applications, and in AI-based applications will lead to a 24% improvement.
The big question mark: How is Intel facing competition?
In general, Intel tonight threw in a lot of data and comparisons, but at almost no stage did it address its positioning in front of competitors that are making it a tough life for it like NVIDIA, AMD and in the last two years also Apple. Thus, it seems that we will have to wait for the first laptops to get into the hands of our users, reviewers and hands, to see if it really manages to bring Fate back to the competition.
Oh, and finally she gave a first look at a limited edition of her graphics card:
A good old age
Born with a joystick in hand. He has far too many gadgets and far too little free time to play with them all. An unexplained hammer holder for calibrating device batteries. When he’s not busy writing about technology, he likes to talk about it, and a lot
