Intel’s sharpest Arc “Alchemist” graphics card takes up space in front of the camera

The recent processor series Intel “Alder Lake” is only days away, but in parallel the company is working on its return to the graphics card market. The scalable architecture Xe is the basis for this, an architecture that has so far taken place in both data centers and laptops. The game-oriented design is called Arc and early data suggests that the performance and price of the first generation, “Alchemist”, is compared to the lower top class from both AMD and Nvidia.

This spring, the Youtube channel Moore’s Law Is Dead got its hands on pictures of development copies of Arc, then known as Xe-HPG DG2. Now the same profile follows up with updated images of the same graphics card, which now seems to be approaching a finished stage. The graphics card in question is Intel’s most powerful variant with 512 computing units and 16 GB of graphics memory, hardware that is accompanied by a two-fan cooler surrounded by a silver-gray, wavy cover.

Like the latest reference cards from AMD and Nvidia, these are axial fans, here adorned with the Intel logo. Below these is a heat sink built of heat pipes and aluminum sheets, which results in a total height around two expansion points. Whether the Intel-signed reference model will appear in the trade can only be speculated about, but it is probably at least a reference model that partner manufacturers can relate to.

From this it can be read that the circuit board can be made relatively compact and a large part of the heat sink is visible outside the circuit board for unobstructed air flow. The power supply consists of an 8- and a 6-pin connector, which together with the PCI Express connection sets the ceiling to 300 watts. It is worth mentioning that a new power connector with a capacity of 600 watts is coming in with the PCI Express 5.0 standard, a standard that sees the light of day with “Alder Lake” and possibly also the company’s graphics card.

In addition to the photographs, Moore’s Law Is Dead also sends pictures of a less powerful Intel Arc model. In this case, these are renderings of 3D models, but these are said to be based on originals that have been glimpsed in reality. The model lacks external power supply and it thus tends to be one of the simplest variants, for example with 128 calculation units. The smaller external dimensions and the single fan are in line with modest performance and power consumption.

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