One of the things that Bill Gates did in his days as president of Microsoft was to take job offers to guess what the competition was working on and be able to strategically get ahead of them. Something very similar is what insiders and leakers of news about hardware do, since when they do not have leaks by companies they look for their information by snooping in the drivers that usually have references to the products that are going to be launched in the short and medium term.
This has allowed that a few weeks after Intel’s presentation at CES it has been possible to know what the initial range of its ARC Alchemist GPUs will be.
Intel ARC Alchemist range revealed?
Thanks to an analysis of the graphics driver in its version 30.0.101.9999 It has been possible to know what is the nomenclature of Intel’s graphic GPUs, as well as which will be the first to appear on the market and, therefore, it has been possible to know what the initial range of ARC Alchemist will be.
The graphics controller has revealed the first four ARC Alchemist chips that we will see. The first two are for laptops and are called A350M and A370M, while the desktop versions are called A350 and A380. Everything indicates that these GPUs would not be high performance, but rather would compete in the entry range against the NVIDIA RTX 3050 and its just filed MX550, both based on the GA107 chip. As for rival on the part of AMD would be the RX 6500 and RX 6400.
Another graphics chip that has been revealed is the Iris Xe A200M, which will accompany some models of CPUs with Alder Lake architecture for laptops, but not as an integrated GPU, but as a separate chip. This is not part of the ARC Alchemist architecture and hence its different nomenclature. Most likely it is a rebranding of the Iris Xe Max.
The enthusiastic range will come later
We know that Intel has two different chips designed for its first generation of gaming GPU and everything indicates that it will be with the most modest that they will present them at CES for their subsequent market launch. We do not know at the moment what will be the nomenclature that will be used in graphics cards that use the DG2-512 chip as GPU, since so far only information about the DG2-128.
We know this from the fact that not long ago the information of the Intel ARC Alchemist A380 was leaked, which has 1024 ALU in FP32 spread over 8 Xe Cores, a clock speed of 2.45 GHz and a 96-bit bus with 6 GB GDDR6. So with all this it is clear to us that if we want an alternative to the Radeon from AMD or the GeForce from NVIDIA in the form of an Intel gaming graphics card then we will have to wait an additional time for its launch on the market.
In any case, those of Jensen Huang have not taken the blue brand too seriously when entering the market, since they have prepared a review of their RTX 30 in response, where the one that stands out the most is the 3090 Ti model and how We fast-forward to earlier in the week, the RTX 3070 Ti 16GB and RTX 3080 12GB lag behind.
