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First Intel Arc GPUs are available - competition for AMD and Nvidia?

[17:52 Thu,31.March 2022   by Thomas Richter]    

Intel has now presented the first models of its long announced series of dedicated graphics cards. The new Intel Arc graphics cards of the first generation, called "Alchemist", will be launched in the three different model series Arc 3, Arc5 and Arc 7 with ascending performance. Intel is now making a start with the mobile Arc 3 A370M and A350M models for laptops, manufactured by TSMC in 6 nanometer technology, of which the former has 1024 shaders, a 64-bit memory interface as well as 4 GB RAM.

Intel_arcs
Intel Arc GPUs




However, they won&t actually be available for a few weeks yet - there aren&t even any models for the test labs at the moment and therefore no independent benchmark results that could provide real performance data. Furthermore, these first mobile models of the Arc 3 are aimed at ultrabooks with a very small Thermal Design Power (TDP) of only 25 to 50 watts and are therefore rather weak in performance and difficult to compare with other GPUs.



Demo but no benchmarks

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Intel did release a video with a Blender demo, but did not give any information which of its Arc GPUs was used (panels with technical info about the GPU were obscured in the video). What is shown is how quickly a high-quality preview is rendered when depth of field is manipulated, among other things, and how renderings are denoised via GPU. Although it is also shown at the end how long it takes to render a certain scene (7.3s), this is useless for assessing the power of the Arc GPU without comparison data with other graphics cards.



Intel Arc versions

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The more interesting powerful (desktop) versions are not scheduled to be released until the summer as part of a "Limited Edition". The most powerful Arc 7 A770 model will have a clock speed of 1,650 MHz, 4096 shader cores, a computing power of 13.5 teraflops (FP32), as well as a 256-bit wide memory interface and 16 GB of GDDR6 RAM with a memory transfer rate of about 512 GB/s. The mobile version of the Arc 7 is said to swallow up to 120 to 150 watts.

intel-arc-alchemist-laptop-specs
Intel Arc Mobile models for laptops


The Arc 7&s performance is said to be comparable to mid-range GPUs from AMD&s Radeon and Nvidia&s GeForce lineup. On the pictures of the Arc 7 A770 published by Intel, a two PCIe slots wide desktop graphics card with dual fan can be seen, which has an HDMI as well as three DisplayPorts. All major manufacturers, such as Acer, Asus, Dell, MSI, Gigabyte, HP, Samsung and Lenovo, will launch Intel&s Arc GPUs either in the form of discrete graphics cards or in notebooks.

intel-arc-desktop-gpu
Intel Arc Desktop


Intel has also changed its nomenclature for the launch of the Arc GPUs, so the previous Execution Unit (EU) is now called Xe Vector Engine (XVE), which integrates 8 shader cores. An Xe core accommodates 16 such XVEs and is comparable to AMD&s Compute Unit (CU) or Nvidia&s Shader Multiprocessor (SM). The Arc GPUs can also upscale the resolution in games via Xe Matrix Extensions (XMX), which are comparable to Nvidia&s Tensor cores and DeepLearning algorithms via XeSS (Xe Super Sampling) (similar to Nvidia&s DLSS).

Video encoding and decoding in all current formats

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Intel&s GPUs could be interesting for video editing for another reason besides performance: no other manufacturer already supports as many codec variations in hardware as Intel, and Intel&s Arc GPUs will be the first ever to handle encoding in the modern open-source AV1 codec, which is also used by YouTube, among others, and could also be interesting for live streaming due to its high efficiency. Intel Arc can now encode and decode 8K HDR video in all current codecs such as AVC (H.264), HEVC (H.265), VP9 and AV1.

intel-arc-codecs
Intel Arc Codec Support



Display technology support isn&t quite as up to date, however, as the Arc graphics cards only feature HDMI 2.0 instead of the current HDMI 2.1, which somewhat limits the bandwidth and possible maximum resolution/refresh rate via HDMI, as well as DisplayPort 1.4. With the help of the XE Display Engine, this should support up to two 8K displays at up to 60 Hz, or four 4K monitors at up to 120 Hz.

Intel Arc future - waiting for benchmarks

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Intel has also already published a roadmap that charts the path of the next increasingly powerful Arc generations (Battlemage, Celestial, Druid) over the next few years. In view of finally falling prices of GPUs, the timing for Intel&s market entry is no longer quite as optimal as it was recently, but a third player in the GPU market is good anyway.


Bild zur Newsmeldung:
Intel_arc_roadmap

Link more infos at bei www.intel.com

deutsche Version dieser Seite: Erste Intel Arc GPUs - endlich Konkurrenz für AMD und NVIDIA?

  



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deutsche Version dieser Seite: Erste Intel Arc GPUs - endlich Konkurrenz für AMD und NVIDIA?



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