The latest Intel Investor Meeting brought attention to the Intel Arc , an acronym that identifies the family of dedicated graphics cards of the Santa Clara company, expected on the market for this quarter (actually concluded). Leaving aside the expectations of the US giant for future generations of GPUs, it now seems confirmed that the launch of the first “Arc Alchemist” products has been definitively postponed to the second quarter, probably to give the company time to polish up the latest “imperfections” of the case.
In the meantime, the first tests of what should be the definitive models of Arc Alchemist graphics cards begin to leak on the net, at least at the hardware level. In detail we are talking about the new benchmark that appeared on Geekbench of the presumed top of the Intel range, to be clear the Arc Alchemist variant is equipped with 4.096 Shading Unit Xe-HPG 512EU GPU .
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The result of Geekbench’s Open CL test is usually not very indicative for gaming, however it should be noted that the performance in this test is not excellent and, at least currently, it places this model on top of a GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER. Performance and performance aside, which could actually be behind this small postponement (read drivers / software), Geekbench confirms that the Intel flagship model will have a maximum clock of 2.4 GHz and not 2.1 GHz as previously assumed.
This means that Intel will present itself on the market with a rather pushed model, certainly helped by the TSMC node at 6nm and also combined with 16GB of GDDR6 VRAM on a 256-bit bus. Recall that this Intel model should compete, at least on paper, with a GeForce RTX 3070/3070 Ti, definitely far away if we look at this benchmark, but with results that still need to be compared in the gaming field, possibly with more mature drivers.
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Returning to the launch date topic, at the moment there are no statements from Intel which, in the meantime, has expanded its team of experts with Rohit Verma ; Verma is a very well known name in the world as it was “acquired” by the competitor AMD where it occupied a prominent place in the Radeon Discrete GPU division. Rohit Verma’s is actually a return to Intel after working in the company for 14 years as a Lead SoC Architect (1999/2013); at that time in the company there was already Pat Gelsinger who, in short, he “brought” him back to Intel with the new role of Lead Product Architect of Discrete GPU SoC. In conclusion, Intel has a lot of potential to exploit, we will see what it will be able to realize and put in place (hopefully soon).
