Rushing the deadline for the first quarter of 2022 to the maximum, Intel yesterday presented its long-awaited Intel Arc Alchemist for laptops, with the Intel ARC A350M as the most basic model of the Intel Arc 3 family, the set of graphics adapters that make up the entry-level range of the manufacturer’s proposal.
As we told you yesterday, his proposal is divided into the Intel Arc 3, Arc 5 and Arc 7 families, the entry, medium and high ranges, and the first to debut on the market are the Arc 3, which did so yesterday, along with the announcement. This family is made up of two models, the Intel ARC A350M and the ARC 370M. Let’s remember the differences between them:
| Intel Arc Alchemist A350M | Intel Arc Alchemist A370M | |
| cores | 6 Xe cores | 8 Xe cores |
| shaders | 768 shaders | 1,024 shaders |
| Ray traced nuclei | 6 cores | 8 cores |
| GPU speed | 1,150 megahertz | 1,550 megahertz |
| Memory | 4 gigabytes of GDDR6 | 4 gigabytes of GDDR6 |
| bus speed | 64 bit | 64 bit |
| TGP | 25-35 watts | 35-50 watts |
Thus, although we already have the official technical specifications, what we are waiting for is the first official performance tests, which allow us to start establishing comparisons between Intel graphics adapters and those of NVIDIA and AMD. However, some unofficial evidence has already been revealed, which allows us to draw some interesting conclusions. And from what we are going to see next, it seems that we can already establish an equivalence between the Intel ARC A350M and the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 165o series, which is certainly a very good starting point.
Samsung Galaxy Book 2 PRO
Intel i7 1260P + Intel ARC A530MDefault VS Performance mode
3DMark Firestrike, TimeSpy pic.twitter.com/UP8mfvy9R0
— 포시포시 (@harukaze5719) March 31, 2022
The origin of the data is found in some alleged performance tests, originating in China and with 3DMark as the battlefield, in which the Arc A350M would have faced the GTX 1650 Mobile, and according to these results, the Intel ARC A350M is 16% faster than the Intel Iris Max (based on the chip DG1) on the Fire Strike test and 70% faster on the Time Spy test. These results may be related to the fact that this card has been designed to take advantage of DirectX 12.
If the data of this test is confirmed, the Intel Arc A350M would be located, for performance, between GeForce GTX 1650 Ti and GTX 1650 Max-Q series. However, there is an important point in this regard and that would play in favor of Intel graphics, and that is that all models, even entry-level ones, support hardware ray tracing and are compatible with XeSS, the Intel image resampling.
We must, however, take these results with some skepticism. It will take a while for us to see the first 100% reliable performance results of the Intel ARC A350M. Of course, if they are confirmed, Intel will have done its homework, and without a doubt its presence in the graphics card market can be the reason for much joy in the future.
