Intel is entering the GPU market this year with its Arc components. The Arc GPUs are set to rival the likes of NVIDIA and AMD and provide raw GPU power to desktops and notebooks just as AMD’s Radeon and NVIDIA’s RTX do today. The company has officially unveiled the hardware saying that the desktop range will launch in the coming months and the notebooks will also release in stages in the future with Intel Arc GPUs inside of them.
We don’t know much about the new desktop Intel Arc GPUs at this time. The company has yet to share any official specs and benchmarks of the hardware itself. However, Intel says they will share more in the coming week leading up to its June/July launch.
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We can see from the video Intel released that the Arc GPUs pack a dual-fan design with a single HDMI port and three DisplayPorts. We don’t know what specifications these are yet. The company is also calling these cards “Limited Edition”. However, we don’t know what that means either. Is Intel going to release limited stock of them or perhaps a different version after launch? Who knows at this point?
As for the Intel Arc notebook GPUs. These come in powerful Arc 3, Arc 5 and Arc 7 models. These also feature XeSS AI-Based Super Sampling which is not expected to be available at launch. Intel is determined to offer a wide range of unique models across all three Arc GPUs for notebooks. They start at the A350M and go all the way up to A770M. [perfectpullquote align=”right” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Pity Intel’s debut has left us with more questions than answers. [/perfectpullquote]
The Arc 3 350M packs six Xe-Cores and six ray-tracing units. The A370M includes eight of both. These lower-end Arc GPUs use 25W – 50W of power and are meant to be ultra-portable and are designed to offer more graphical power than say the Intel Iris Xe and NVIDIA X450M. The Arc 3 GPUs are apparently available now and notebook makers can opt to include them in their units.
Anyone looking for more notebook graphical power will have to look towards the Arc 5 and Arc 7 model. These have anywhere from 24 to 32 ray-tracing cores and 16GB RAM. However, these top-tier notebook GPUs aren’t launching until June/July too which doesn’t give us any real information on benchmarks or tests until then.
I will say that Intel’s top-tier Arc 7 A770M sounds like a beast on paper. It aims to use 120-150W of power, packs a 256-bit memory bus, 16GB of RAM and a graphics clock of 1650MHz. It sounds great. Now we just need to see it in action and maybe get a price for it all? Intel has yet to share any direct comparisons on these new Arc GPUs. In fact, they haven’t mentioned at all how they compare to NVIDIA and AMD.
We will have to wait and see how this all plays out. The Arc 3 GPUs are expected to ship wherever possible in upcoming notebooks. The Arc 5 and Arc 7 models are coming in later months. We also can’t wait to see how the dedicated desktop Arc GPU handles gaming. Pity Intel’s debut has left us with more questions than answers.
