Finally, and after much waiting, the first desktop graphics card with Intel’s ARC Alchemist architecture has appeared on the market. And not just in one version but in two. On the one hand, in the form of the standard or reference model and on the other in the form of a personalized graph. How are the first ARC cards A380 and what is its performance compared to its rivals NVIDIA and AMD?
Well yes, when we had already given up hope that we would see an ARC Alchemist come true in the guise of a finished product, Intel has just launched its A380 graphics card on the market. Of course, with a catch, since at the moment it has only been done for the market and we do not completely know when it will appear in the West.
How is the Intel ARC A380 that has been launched in China?
Well, its technical specifications are nothing to write home about, due to the fact that it is based on the smallest and, therefore, the simplest chip of the three that Intel is supposed to launch with this architecture. So its specifications are quite modest at least, since it is really a low-end graphics card.
- Its consumption is only 75W,
- The GPU is the chip ACM-G11 with 8 Xe-Cores a 2GHz speed.
- Comes with 3 GDDR6 memory chips on a 96 bit bus.
- configurations of 3 or 6GB memory
- Which translates to 192GB/s of bandwidth.
- Your performance? Well, quite low, given its performance it is between the RX 6400 and the RX 6500 from AMD.
- In exchange, its price is around 150 euros.
Despite the low power of this graphics card, it is fully compatible with the DirectX 12 Ultimate API and contains units for Ray Tracing. Without forgetting, of course, the NVIDIA Tensor Core equivalent units that Intel has dubbed XMX, which is key to XeSS, the answer to DLSS. In any case, everything indicates that it would be the same chip that is being mounted in laptops. The fact that it supports Deep Link is what makes us suspicious, since this feature was designed to be used in tandem with a laptop’s CPU. Specifically with its integrated GPU
First custom model of an ARC Alchemist
Although this time it is not about any of the well-known brands, but about Gunnir, which has presented a dual fan version baptized as A380 Photon. Whose images you can see below these lines. However, unlike the Intel reference model, it makes use of a 8 pin connector, so it has some room for overclocking. Something that can be intuited by the use of a better cooling system than the one used in the standard model.
At the same time, they have also a preview of a triple fan model. Which could refer to the A770 and A780, which will use the largest chip in the ARC Alchemist. Which is still unprecedented even on laptops. Although as has happened with the A380 that has just been launched, we suspect that it will also be a version derived from the chips for gaming laptops.
