[Hardware] Intel Arc Alchemist: Release Date, Specs, Everything We Know

[-Sn!PeR-]

 

Intel has been hyping up Xe Graphics for about two years, but the Intel Arc Alchemist GPU will finally bring some needed performance and competition from Team Blue to the discrete GPU space. This is the first 'real' dedicated Intel GPU since the i740 back in 1998 — or technically, a proper discrete GPU after the Intel Xe DG1 paved the way last. The competition among the best graphics cards is fierce, and Intel's current integrated graphics solutions basically don't even rank on our GPU benchmarks hierarchy (UHD Graphics 630 sits at 1.8% of the RTX 3090 based on just 1080p medium performance).

The latest announcement from Intel is that the Arc A770 is coming October 12, starting at $329. That's a lot lower on pricing than what was initially rumored, but then the A770 is also coming out far later than originally intended. With Intel targeting better than RTX 3060 levels of performance, at a potentially lower price and with more VRAM, things are shaping up nicely for Team Blue.

Could Intel, purveyor of low performance integrated GPUs—"the most po[CENSORED]r GPUs in the world"—possibly hope to compete? Yes, it can. Plenty of questions remain, but with the official China-first launch of Intel Arc Alchemist laptops and the desktop Intel Arc A380 now behind us, plus plenty of additional details of the Alchemist GPU architecture, we now have a reasonable idea of what to expect. Intel has been gearing up its driver team for the launch, fixing compatibility and performance issues on existing graphics solutions, hopefully getting ready for the US and "rest of the world" launch. Frankly, there's nowhere to go from here but up.

The difficulty Intel faces in cracking the dedicated GPU market can't be underestimated. AMD's Big Navi / RDNA 2 architecture has competed with Nvidia's Ampere architecture since late 2020. While the first Xe GPUs arrived in 2020, in the form of Tiger Lake mobile processors, and Xe DG1 showed up by the middle of 2021, neither one can hope to compete with even GPUs from several generations back. Overall, Xe DG1 performed about the same as Nvidia's GT 1030 GDDR5, a weak-sauce GPU hailing from May 2017. It was also a bit better than half the performance of 2016's GTX 1050 2GB, despite having twice as much memory.

The Arc A380 did better, but it still only managed to match or slightly exceed the performance of the GTX 1650 (GDDR5 variant) and RX 6400. Video encoding hardware was a high point at least. More importantly, the A380 is potentially about a quarter of the performance of the top-end Arc A770, so there's still hope.

Intel has a steep mountain to ascend if it wants to be taken seriously in the dedicated GPU space. Here's the breakdown of the Arc Alchemist architecture, a look at the announced products, some Intel-provided benchmarks, all of which give us a glimpse into how Intel hopes to reach the summit. Truthfully, we're just hoping Intel can make it to base camp, leaving the actual summiting for the future Battlemage, Celestial, and Druid architectures. But we'll leave those for a future discussion. 

 

 

Intel's Xe Graphics aspirations hit center stage in early 2018, starting with the hiring of Raja Koduri from AMD, followed by chip architect Jim Keller and graphics marketer Chris Hook, to name just a few. Raja was the driving force behind AMD's Radeon Technologies Group, created in November 2015, along with the Vega and Navi architectures. Clearly, the hope is that he can help lead Intel's GPU division into new frontiers, and Arc Alchemist represents the results of several years worth of labor.

Not that Intel hasn't tried this before. Besides the i740 in 1998, Larrabee and the Xeon Phi had similar goals back in 2009, though the GPU aspect never really panned out. Plus, Intel has steadily improved the performance and features in its integrated graphics solutions over the past couple of decades (albeit at a slow and steady snail's pace). So, third time's the charm, right?

There's much more to building a good GPU than just saying you want to make one, and Intel has a lot to prove. Here's everything we know about the upcoming Intel Arc Alchemist, including specifications, performance expectations, release date, and more.

 

Potential Intel Arc Alchemist Specifications and Price

 

 

We'll get into the details of the Arc Alchemist architecture below, but let's start with the high-level overview. Intel has two different Arc Alchemist GPU dies, covering three different product families, the 700-series, 500-series, and 300-series. The first letter also denotes the family, so A770 are for Alchemist, and the future Battlemage parts will likely be named Arc B770 or similar.

Here are the specifications for the various desktop Arc GPUs that Intel has revealed. All of the figures are now more or less confirmed, except for A580 power.

 

Quote

Intel Arc Alchemist Specifications

  Arc A770 Arc A750 Arc A580 Arc A380 Architecture ACM-G10 ACM-G10 ACM-G10 ACM-G11 Process Technology TSMC N6 TSMC N6 TSMC N6 TSMC N6 Transistors (Billion) 21.7 21.7 21.7 7.2 Die size (mm^2) 406 406 406 157 Xe-Cores 32 28 24 8 GPU Cores (Shaders) 4096 3584 3072 1024 MXM Engines 512 448 384 128 RTUs 32 28 24 8 Game Clock (MHz) 2100 2050 1700 2000 VRAM Speed (Gbps) 17.5 16 16 15.5 VRAM (GB) 16/8 8 8 6 VRAM Bus Width 256 256 256 96 ROPs 128 128 128 32 TMUs 256 224 192 64 TFLOPS FP32 (Boost) 17.2 14.7 10.4 4.1 TFLOPS FP16 (MXM) 138 118 84 33 Bandwidth (GBps) 560 512 512 186 PCIe Link x16 4.0 x16 4.0 x16 4.0 x8 4.0 TBP (watts) 225 225 150? 75 Launch Date Oct 12, 2022 Oct 12, 2022 Oct 2022? June 2022 Starting Price $329 ? ? $139

 

These are Intel's official core specs on the full large and small Arc Alchemist chips. Based on the wafer and die shots, along with other information, we expect Intel to enter the dedicated GPU market with products spanning the entire budget to high-end range.

Intel has five different mobile SKUs, the A350M, A370M, A550M, A730M, and A770M. Those are understandably power constrained, while for desktops there will be (at least) A770, A750, A580, and A380 models. Intel also has Pro A40 and Pro A50 variants for professional markets (still using the smaller chip), and we can expect additional models for that market as well.

The Arc A300-series targets entry-level performance, the the A500 series goes after the midrange market, and A700 is for the high-end offerings — though we'll have to see where they actually land in our GPU benchmarks hierarchy when they launch. Arc mobile GPUs along with the A380 were available in China first, but the desktop A580, A750, and A770 should be full world-wide launches. Releasing the first parts in China wasn't a good look, especially since one of Intel's previous "China only" products was Cannon Lake, with the Core i3-8121U that basically only just saw the light of day before getting buried deep under ground.

We now have an official launch date for the A770 and presumably A750 as well, though we're not clear if the A580 will also be launching on that date or what it might cost. Intel did reveal that the A770 will start at $329, presumably for the 8GB variant — unless Intel is feeling very generous and the A770 Limited Edition made by Intel will also start at $329? (Probably not.)

Also note that the maximum theoretical compute performance in teraflops (TFLOPS) uses Intel's "Game Clock," which is supposedly an average of typical gaming clocks. AMD and Nvidia sort of have that as well but call it a boost clock, and in practice we usually see gaming clocks higher than the official values. For Intel, we're not sure what will happen. The Gunnir Arc A380 has a 2450 MHz boost clock for example, and in gaming it was pretty much locked in at that speed, though it also used more power than the 75W Intel gives for the reference design. It sounds like "typical" gaming scenarios will probably run at higher clocks, which would be good.

Real-world performance will also depend on drivers, which have been a sticking point for Intel in the past. Gaming performance will play a big role in determining how much Intel can charge for the various graphics card models.

As shown in our GPU price index, the prices of competing AMD and Nvidia GPUs have plummeted this year. Intel would have been in great shape if it had managed to launch Arc at the start of the year with reasonable prices, which was the original plan (actually, late 2021 was at one point in the cards). Many gamers might have given Intel GPUs a shot if they were priced at half the cost of the competition, even if they were slower.

That takes care of the high-level overview. Now let's dig into the finer points and discuss where these estimates come from.

 

Source.