Intel's gaming graphics is finally coming, barely before the end of the first quarter
The first generation of gaming discrete GPUs from Intel – back then designated “Xe HPG” – was supposed to come out in 2021. That obviously didn’t happen and there has been confusion as to how much delay will there be ever since. In the end, it looks like Intel will narrowly manage to launch in the first quarter of this year, as promised last summer. Though it won’t be stand-alone desktop cards yet, just lower-end laptop cards.
This rather last-minute release doesn’t apply to desktop cards, though – those are looking more likely to be released sometime around May. Intel’s first entry into the gaming market will only be in laptops for now. And Intel has already confirmed it directly. The company made an announcement inviting people to the unveiling event of Intel Arc graphics on March 30 at 8:00 a.m. Pacific Time. For us Europeans, it’ll be 17:00 CET on the same day. The event is called “A New Stage of the Game”.
The Intel Arc graphics for laptops will be based on the same GPU chips that are expected to appear in desktop cards a few months later, so what will be presented will be relevant in general. But the gaming laptop versions will logically have reduced power draw and thus lower performance.
It’s not yet clear whether a laptop with Intel Arc graphics will be available for purchase on March 30. According to unofficial rumors, the first to actually go on sale (or rather, be offered by laptop manufacturers) are going to be the cheaper and lower-performance Arc GPUs out of the two Intel’s 6nm chips that should be nearing release now. The first generation is codenamed Alchemist and this GPU is supposedly “SoC2”.
Cheaper Arc A300 series graphics coming first
It is a relatively small chip with 128 EU blocks, which means 1024 shaders. The GPU is said to have a 96-bit memory bus allowing 6 GB of GDDR6 to be fitted, but it’s also possible that the mobile variant will stick with just 4 GB on a 64-bit bus. Leaks say that the official names of these graphics could be Intel Arc A350M and Arc A370M. The second one is actually already confirmed. Intel states in its materials that “Intel Arc A370M Graphics” will be up to 2x more powerful compared to the integrated GPU of Alder Lake Core i7-1280P processors – this has an iGPU with 96 EU (768 shaders) at 1450 MHz, similar to the quite fast graphics of Tiger Lake-U processors.
Anyway, this GPU will mostly fall into the lower-performance entry-level GPU space, but with still retaining usable gaming performance. But Intel is also preparing a more powerful GPU – “SoC1” with 4096 shaders (512 EU), 256-bit memory and 16 GB GDDR6 capacity. This GPU will therefore have virtually four times the hardware resources in everything, and thus possibly up to 4x the performance. Although due to the power limitations in laptops, the difference will probably be smaller in practice. Graphics with this chip could probably be called Arc A7xx.
However, these versions will probably not be released until several weeks later, so the premiere at the end of the first quarter will only feature the smaller, less expensive variant. But that doesn’t mean the higher-performance version won’t get any mention. On the contrary, Intel will probably show some kind of preliminary “teaser” or demo of its performance, so part of the curiosity for these more powerful gaming graphics could be satisfied, too.
Sources: Intel, Intel, VideoCardz
English translation and edit by Jozef Dudáš, original text by Jan Olšan, editor for Cnews.cz
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