Intel Arc GPU, the challenge to NVIDIA and AMD (from notebooks) finally starts: all the specifications of Arc 3, Arc 5 and Arc 7

Intel officially announced his family’s first dedicated GPUs Arc: we start from the world mobilewith five models named A770M, A730M, A550M, A370M e A350M. Based on architecture Xe High Performance Graphics (HPG)the project renamed Alchemist made by TSMC with N6 production process. The Arc 3, A370M and A350M models are available immediately on board the thinnest notebooks, while the Arc 5 and Arc 7 solutions will debut in early summer to offer even more power.

Intel’s entire offering is based on two GPUs renamed ACM-G10 and ACM-G11 (also known so far as DG2-512 and DG2-128), respectively with 32 e 8 Xe-Core. The A550M, A730M and A770M solutions are based on the G10 variant, which means they have up to 32 Xe-Cores, but only the A770M model has all active units: the A730M and A550M offer 24 and 16 Xe-Cores respectively.

The proposals A370M e A350M based on the G11 variant cover up to 8 Car-Corebut the only model to have them all active the A370M, while the A350M stops at 6.

Each GPU has a X-ray core tracing unit (within it 16 Vector and as many Matrix Engines, the latter called XMX), as already anticipated last year, so to give an example Arc A770M has 32 RT cores (if we want to call them as NVIDIA). Regarding the memory configuration, The A770M features a 256-bit bus connecting 16GB of GDDR6 memory, while the A730M drops to 192-bit and 12GB of GDDR6 memory, respectively.

The Arc A550M GPU accompanied by 8 GB of 128-bit bus memorywhile the models of the line Arc 3 both have 4 GB of memory on a 64-bit bus. As for the TDP, Intel indicates for the Arc A770M a value of 120-150W (depending on the frequency), while the A730M drops to 80-120W. The Arc A550M model stops at 60-80W, while the A370M and A350M solutions reach 35-50W and 25-35W respectively.

Turning to performanceIntel did not provide information for the Arc 7 and Arc 5 solutions, merely talking about Arc 3: aims for performance around 60 fps in Full HD at medium details, as anticipated in recent weeks. The company, as you can see in the slides, did not make comparisons with the proposals of the competition but with the integrated GPU of a Core i7-1280P formed by 96 EU.

Among the common features of these GPUs we find the artificial intelligence units renamed Intel Xe Matrix Extensions (XMX), the analogue of NVIDIA’s Tensor cores. According to Intel, XMX units provide a 16-fold increase in processing capacity over traditional GPU vector units to complete inference operations.

These units will serve both for an optimal management of the upscaling technology XeSS which, probably, also in other contexts. XeSS is coming this summer, supported by more than 20 gameswith the aim of running a game with a quality similar to 4K resolution while maintaining performance comparable to the native 1080p resolution.

Inside the GPU there is also a Media Engine capable of accelerating a wide range of video codecs and standards: Includes the industry’s first hardware-accelerated AV1 encoding and decoding. AV1 is up to 50% more efficient than the most popular codec, H.264, and 30% more efficient than H.265.

Additionally, the HPG Xe Display Engine is ready for high-resolution, refresh rate HDR displays with support for the latest standards including DisplayPort 2.0 for uncompressed 120Hz 4K.

Intel’s Arc GPUs fully support APIDirectX 12 Ultimate from Microsoft and related features such as ray tracing, variable rate shading, mesh shading and sampler feedback. In order to optimal support, as well as offer driver al day 0 for numerous titles, Intel will make the app available to gamers and content creators Arc Controla control panel to control the hardware and the whole experience, switching between custom profiles, streaming, a virtual camera, integrated driver download, game capture and much more.

Each Arc mobile platform also supports Intel Deep Link Technology which allows GPUs to work with Intel’s CPUs and integrated graphics to improve gaming, content creation and streaming performance. The function Hyper Encodecombines media engines from across the platform to accelerate video encoding workloads by up to 60% compared to the performance of a single integrated Iris Xe GPU.

Hyper Compute uses the combined power of compute and AI engines across the entire Intel platform, such as Intel Core processors, Iris Xe graphics, and Intel Arc GPUs, to accelerate several new workloads. In the end, Dynamic Power Share allocates a larger power budget to the Intel Core processor or dedicated Intel Arc graphics chip as needed, increasing performance by up to 30% in compute-intensive creation and applications.

As mentioned at the beginning, Arc 3 GPUs are available immediately in some notebooks, but over the next few months all major OEMs will market products with Intel Arc dedicated GPUs, including the 5 and 7 series models.