Intel Arc Alchemist, here is the first true photo of the top-of-the-range reference video cards

After the photos of an engineering sample many months ago and some renderings widespread in recent weeks , the youtuber Moore’s Law Is Dead has published ( within a video ) the first real photo of an Intel Arc reference video card that will arrive in the course of the first part of 2022. As you can see, only in the case of the top of the range is the photo real, while the smaller version is a rendering, even if the youtuber says he still saw it in “live” photos.

real photo of an Intel Arc reference video card

These reference solutions are not necessarily going to hit the market , although Intel executives have not closed the door on this possibility in recent interviews. The only sure thing is that we will see Intel’s dedicated video cards on the market in custom versions created by partners such as ASUS, MSI, etc. as is the case with NVIDIA and AMD GPUs.

The images show us two cards, a dual fan solution and a smaller one with only one fan . The first is clearly a model that aims at the high end of the market, in fact the previous rumors that speak to us similar performance to the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 / Ti and AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT proposals.

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During the Intel InnovatiON event of the day before yesterday, Intel reiterated that the maximum expected configuration counts 32 Xe-cores ( here a deepening ), each with 16 vector engines for a total of 512 units. Inside the Xe-core there are also 16 Xe Matrix Engines called XMX, dedicated to AI tasks such as XeSS, the antagonist technology of NVIDIA’s DLSS and of which Intel has given new demonstration in the past few hours . Intel’s GPUs fully support DirectX 12 Ultimate, so expect full compatibility with techniques such as ray tracing, mesh shading, variable rate shading, and many more.

The reference board shown in the photos comes with a black PCB and a silver cooling system cover , while the power supply is entrusted to two connectors, one 8-pin and one 6-pin to power a product that would have a TDP around. to 225W. Next to the GPU, which could come with different specifications depending on the target market, there should be up to 16 GB of GDDR6 memory .

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As for the smaller version , the heart would be a GPU with a maximum of 128 vector engines flanked by a maximum of 8 GB of GDDR6 memory . There is talk of a TDP of about 75W and performance that could position it as an antagonist of cards such as the GeForce GTX 1660 Super or the Radeon RX 5600 XT, two proposals based respectively on NVIDIA Turing and AMD RDNA 1 architecture.

Intel Arc “Alchemist” GPUs based on Xe HPG architecture are expected in the first quarter of 2022. According to rumors, although Intel may announce desktop solutions in that period, the actual arrival on the market should materialize only in the second quarter.