Although there are still several months to go before the debut, new rumors are circulating about the series of schede video desktop Arc “Alchemist” which will mark the return of Intel in the world of high-performance GPUs for the gaming market. The rumors diffuse dallo youtuber Moore Law is Dead (MLID) focus on the lineup and its performance, confirming most of the rumors circulated in recent weeks.
Intel should present at least three desktop models featuring 512, 384 and 128 Execution Units (EU). The 512 EU top-of-the-range model (eight Render Slices with 4 Xe-Cores each lead to a total of 512 Vector / Matrix Engines as each Xe-Core contains 16) would have performance between the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti and the RTX 3070 Ti, similar to what indicated by a previous slide. Proximity to one or the other NVIDIA cards will obviously depend on the drivers and games, but for now it seems that the RTX 3080 and higher cards are out of range.
Intel will join the more powerful Alchemist GPU 16 GB of GDDR6 memory at 16 Gbps on a 256-bit bus, although it cannot be ruled out that Intel may present a variant with an 18 Gbps chip. As for the GPU, on the network we speak of an area of 396 mm2 and an operating frequency between 2.2 and 2.5 GHz. As for the TDP, the card should stay below 235W and come on the market with two power connectors, one 8-pin and one 6-pin.
The card with GPU “castrates” to 384 EU it should be associated with 8 GB of GDDR6 memory on 192/256 bit bus (not clear yet). According to MLID, Intel would also have tested a variant with 448 EU, but at the moment this configuration would seem to have been discarded or will be used in the notebook sector, where we should see more variety in configurations. This Intel Arc video card model offer performance between the RTX 3060 and the RTX 3060 Ti.
Read also: Intel Arc Alchemist, with Xe-Core and XeSS is a challenge to Nvidia and AMD on gaming GPUs
Finally, Intel is expected to introduce a second GPU destined for the entry level market, equipped in its maximum expression with 128 EU. It will not be a gaming video card in the true sense of the word as it should have performance between the GTX 1650 and GTX 1650 SUPER (but with hardware support for ray tracing, albeit of dubious use). The GPU should again operate between 2.2 and 2.5 GHz and be flanked by 8/4 GB of GDDR6 memory on 64-bit bus.
In parallel, the leaker @momomo_us has intercepted some documents in which Intel seems to disclose the nomenclature of its future desktop video cards. It appears that Alchemist solutions will come to market with the commercial name “Arc aXXX”, where the “a” will stand for Alchemist and the “X” for a progressive numerical digit which should convey the performance level of each model. It follows that, should Intel continue to follow this pattern, future GPUs Battlemage, Celestial and Druid should be called Arc bXXX, Arc cXXX and Arc dXXX respectively.