Intel has awarded TSMC with some big contracts for future manufacturing of next generation GPUs, according to Taiwan's Commercial Times. As previously covered on TPU, the second generation Battlemage graphics processing units will get fabricated via a 4 nm process. According to insider sources at both partnering companies, Intel is eyeing a release date in the second half of 2024 for this Xe2-based architecture. The same sources pointed to the third generation Celestial graphics processing units being ready in time for a second half of 2026 launch window. Arc Celestial, which is based on the Xe3 architecture, is set for manufacture in the coming years courtesy of TSMC's N3X (3 nm) process node.

One of the sources claim that Intel is quietly confident about its future prospects in the GPU sector, despite mixed critical and commercial reactions to the first generation line-up of Arc Alchemist discrete graphics cards. The company is said to be anticipating great demand for more potent versions of its graphics products in the future, and internal restructuring efforts have not dulled the will of a core team of engineers. The restructuring process resulted in the original AXG graphics division being divided into two sub-groups - CCG and DCAI. The pioneer of the entire endeavor, Raja Koduri, departed Intel midway through last month, to pursue new opportunities with an AI-focused startup.

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has issued the news, via a tweet, of Raja Koduri's departure from the silicon giant. Koduri, who currently sits as Executive Vice President and Chief Architect, will be leaving the company at the end of this month. This ends a five year long tenure at Intel, where he started as Chief Architect back in 2017. He intends to form a brand new startup operation that will focus on AI-generative software for computer games. His tweeted reply to Gelsinger reads: "Thank you Pat and Intel for many cherished memories and incredible learning over the past 5 years. Will be embarking on a new chapter in my life, doing a software startup as noted below. Will have more to share in coming weeks."

Intel has been undergoing numerous internal restructures, and Koduri's AXG Graphics Unit was dissolved late last year. He was the general manager of the graphic chips division prior to its split, and returned to his previous role as Chief Architect at Intel. The company stated at the time that Koduri's new focus would be on: "growing efforts across CPU, GPU and AI, and accelerating high-priority technical programmes."

The Intel Arc A750 "Alchemist" graphics card now starts at a mouth-watering price of just $229, a price that puts it 7% below the MSRP Intel Graphics set for the SKU, with the reference-design A750 being sold at $250. The new low price is commanded by a custom-design ASRock Arc A750 Challenger, a card that combines Intel's second-fastest GPU with a simple 2-slot, twin-fan cooling solution. Intel has been busy with Game On driver updates for the Arc A-series GPUs, besides a recent massive update to the cards' DirectX 11 and DirectX 9 gaming performance. The company claims that the A750 and A770 offer tremendous performance/Dollar gains over the competing NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 in the mainstream segment, aimed at people who play at 1080p and 1440p. Meanwhile the dark horse in this segment is the AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT, with similar real-world prices to the A750, but performance that trades blows with the RTX 3060.

"Panther Lake" is the codename for the microarchitecture behind Intel's 17th Gen Core processors due for 2026-27. It succeeds the 16th Gen "Lunar Lake" (2025-26), 15th Gen "Arrow Lake" (2024-25); and 14th Gen "Meteor Lake" (2023-24) architectures. While very little is known about "Panther Lake," the first piece of information discovered in the LinkedIn profile page of one Intel Graphics engineer, suggests that the graphics tile of the processor will feature an iGPU based on the Xe3 "Celestial" graphics architecture, which is two generations ahead of the current Xe "Alchemist," and one ahead of Xe2 "Battlemage."

Intel's graphics architectures will continue to be highly scalable and modular in their applications, with variants of them scaling between low-power iGPUs to large client discrete GPUs, and very-large HPC-AI processors. The variant for the iGPU powering "Panther Lake" will be Xe3-LPG, a highly skimmed version of the architecture for lower Xe Core counts, with just the right hardware to operate in power-constrained devices such as mobile processors. From the looks of it, Intel will stick with the disaggregated chiplet design for its processor architectures going all the way down to "Panther Lake," as an older company slide detailing the scalability of "Celestial" highlighted a "next platform" processor succeeding "Meteor Lake" and its immediate successor ("Arrow Lake").

Intel became the first of the three discrete GPU makers to release a day-0 graphics driver for "Hogwarts Legacy." The new Intel Arc GPU Graphics Drivers version 101.4123 beta comes with optimization for the hotly anticipated Harry Potter universe-based RPG, as well as the survival horror "Returnal," so gamers on Intel Arc "Alchemist" discrete GPUs can get gaming the moment the game goes live. The company didn't release any fixes for outstanding issues with this particular release, but identified a bunch of new issues with its driver and the Arc Control app.

DOWNLOAD: Intel Arc GPU Graphics Drivers 101.4123 betaUpdate 14:02 UTC: Today's release of NVIDIA GeForce software (version 528.49, lacks "Hogwarts Legacy" optimization.

Update 14:55 UTC: We asked NVIDIA whether a driver update with game-ready support is planned and if there's any estimate when it will come out. The company answered that it had no comment on these questions.

Intel cut the baseline prices of its Arc A750 performance-segment graphics card. The card now starts at USD $249, down from its launch price of $289 for the first-party reference-design card. Among the handful custom-design board partners for the A750 are Acer, Gunnir, and ASRock. The A750 targets maxed-out AAA gaming at 1080p, although the card is capable of higher resolutions with the Intel XeSS performance enhancement.

Based on the 6 nm ACM-G10 silicon, the A750 is endowed with 3,584 unified shaders across 28 Xe Cores or 448 EUs, 224 TMUs, 112 ROPs, and 8 GB of 16 Gbps GDDR6 memory across the chip's full 256-bit wide memory interface (512 GB/s memory bandwidth). The card has a typical board power of 225 W, draws it from a combination of 8-pin and 6-pin PCIe power connectors; and has modern display outputs that include HDMI 2.0 and DisplayPort 2.1. The Arc "Alchemist" family of GPUs meets the full DirectX 12 Ultimate feature-set, including real-time ray tracing. They also have regular driver updates with day-zero optimization for big game releases.Many Thanks to TumbleGeorge for the tip.

Intel in its Q4-2022 Financial Results presentation confirmed that it has split Accelerated Computing Group (AXG), the business that designs both client GPUs and scalar compute processors, and distributed its IP among the CCG (client computing group), and DCAI (data-center and artificial-intelligence group). CCG is Intel's largest breadwinner, and the group behind its Intel Core client processors. This business was receiving iGPU IP from AXG, and will now oversee all its client graphics portfolio. The DCAI group will handle the company's Data Center GPU lineup, with products such as "Ponte Vecchio."

Over 2023, Intel is expected to update its Arc Graphics series with the refreshed "Alchemist+" graphics architecture. Very little is known about "Alchemist+," except that it is rumored to introduced a more advanced third-party foundry node than its current TSMC 6 nm node; and while retaining the same IP as the current "Alchemist" GPUs, scale upward—either in terms of Xe core counts; or performance, by increasing clock-speeds. 2024 will see Intel introduce "Battlemage," its second client graphics architecture for discrete GPUs. "Battlemage" is expected to introduce new architectural changes, utilize an even newer foundry node, and significantly increase performance. Raja Koduri hinted in late 2022 that he still wants to build GPUs in the 200-300 W power-range, without implying that this constitutes "mid-range," so we'll have to wait and see how "Battlemage" improves performance/Watt over "Alchemist+."Image Courtesy: VideoCardz

Intel Graphics today released the latest version of its Arc GPU Graphics Drivers. Version 101.4090 beta comes with launch-day optimization for "Forspoken." The company also fixed a couple of issues with this release. For Arc "Alchemist" discrete GPUs, an application freeze issue with "A Plague Tale: Requiem" has been fixed. Box corruptions noticed in "Need for Speed: Unbound," have also been fixed. For Intel Core processors with Xe LP-based iGPUs, a screenspace corruption issue with NFS: Unbound has been fixed; besides an intermittent application crash with Total War: Warhammer III in DirectX 11 mode, and color corruption in Battlefield: 2042. Grab the drivers from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: Intel Arc GPU Graphics Drivers 101.4090 beta

TechPowerUp today released the latest version of TechPowerUp GPU-Z, the popular PC graphics information, monitoring, and diagnostics utility. Version 2.52.0 adds support for AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX, RX 7900 XT, RX 6300 OEM; NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti, and a few rare "Ampere" based GPUs in circulation these days, including the RTX 3080 Ti 20 GB, RTX 3070 Ti based on GA102 silicon, RTX 3050 based on GA107, and the PCIe AIC version of the A800 80 GB accelerator. Detection is improved for the Xe LP-based iGPU of Intel Core "Raptor Lake" processors. NVIDIA GPUs with ECC memory now have ECC status reported in the Advanced panel. On GPUs where the boost frequency can't be read, the base frequency will be used to calculate fillrates. Clock speed detection for Intel Arc "Alchemist" GPUs has been improved. Vendor detection has been added for several new graphics card brands such as Corsair (gaming notebooks), Maxsun, and Wingtech.

DOWNLOAD: TechPowerUp GPU-Z v2.52.0

Intel Arc "Alchemist" graphics architecture was originally developed as a forward-facing PC GPU architecture with many of the contemporary graphics technologies, including full DirectX 12 Ultimate support, however, the GPU curiously lacks hardware support for DirectX 9. Released 20 years ago, DirectX 9 continued to power AAA PC titles well into the 2010s as game console development lagged (the era of Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3), and most e-sports titles of the time included either native or fallback DirectX 9 support for those on older GPUs. This is a problem for Intel, as many of the currently-popular e-Sports titles may still use DirectX 9, and so the Intel Graphics team set out to individually optimize DirectX 9 titles with each new Arc GPU driver release.

While Arc GPUs lack DirectX 9 support, foolproof API translation technologies exist, which convert DirectX 9 API instructions into DirectX 12. This is not fundamentally unlike how 32-bit applications work on 64-bit Windows (using WOW64 machine-architecture translation). This, however, requires per-game optimization to ensure any engine-level special features are correctly translated. With the latest 101.3959 Beta drivers, Intel optimized popular DirectX 9 titles "League of Legends," "Counter Strike: Global Offensive," "Starcraft 2," "Payday 2," "Guild Wars 2," "Stellaris," "NiZhan," and "Moonlight Blade." The company seems to be going about this the smart way, by relying on market analysis for selecting the games in need of optimization (understanding what DirectX 9 games are still being played).

Intel Arc A770 "Alchemist" graphics card has an idle power-draw problem. It pulls 44 W (card-only) power when idling. This used to be acceptable some 15 years ago, but GPU idle power-draw has come a long way since. The reigning Goliath GeForce RTX 4090 pulls just 21 W when idling, and the RTX 3070, the card the A770 was extensively compared against, only pulls 9 W—that's 7 LED downlights worth power-difference between the A770 and RTX 3070. Intel has a workaround to this problem: enable the PCI-Express active state power management (ASPM) setting to L1 mode in your motherboard's UEFI BIOS setup program.

The Intel Xe-HPG "Alchemist" graphics architecture reportedly uses PCIe Gen 2-era L0 and L1 ASPM, which needs to be forced via software settings. To do this, find the PCIe ASPM settings in your BIOS setup, and enable them with the "L1" setting. You then make your way to Power Options in the Windows Control Panel, edit your active power scheme, and manually set the PCI-Express "Link state power-management" to "Maximum." This affects the power-management behavior and performance of all PCIe devices in your system, including NVMe SSDs, not just the graphics card. Intel did not put out its power-draw numbers for this workaround, but we intend to test it as soon as we can.

ASRock today launched its Arc "Alchemist" A770 and A750 custom-design graphics cards. These include the A770 Phantom Gaming OC, and the A750 Challenger OC. The A770 maxes out the 6 nm ACM-G10 silicon, featuring all 32 Xe Cores (4,096 unified shaders); besides 16 Gbps GDDR6 memory; whereas the A750 gets 28 Xe Cores (3,584 unified shaders), and 16 Gbps GDDR6 memory. Both of ASRock's cards come with 8 GB of memory across a 256-bit wide memory bus, there's no 16 GB version of the A770 Phantom Gaming.

The ASRock A770 Phantom Gaming features a premium, RGB-illuminated cooling solution that's also found in the company's Radeon RX 6000-series Phantom Gaming graphics cards. This card also offers a factory-overclock of 2.20 GHz compared to 2.10 GHz reference. The cooler features a dual fin-stack heatsink with five 6 mm-thick nickel-plated copper heat-pipes that make indirect contact with the GPU over a copper base-plate. The dual ball-bearings fans come with idle fan-stop. There's a switch to manually turn off RGB lighting.

Intel announced the general availability of the Arc A770 and A750 performance-segment desktop graphics cards. This includes Intel's reference-design Limited Edition cards, and custom-design ones by the likes of ASRock, Gunnir, and Acer, among other OEMs. The A750 has a baseline price of USD $289, the A770 8 GB at $329, and the A770 16 GB at $349.

Based on the Xe-HPG "Alchemist" graphics architecture, the A750 and A770 are carved out of the same 6 nm ACM-G10 silicon. The A750 is configured with 28 Xe Cores, 448 EU, or 3,584 unified shaders; whereas the A770 maxes it out with 32 Xe Cores, 512 EU, or 4,096 unified shaders. Both cards get 256-bit wide GDDR6 memory interfaces, and while the A750 uses 16 Gbps memory (512 GB/s bandwidth); the A770 has 17.5 Gbps (560 GB/s).

ASRock is shaping up to be the first major custom-design Intel Arc "Alchemist" board partner with a footprint in the EU and North America. The company is ready with a pair of custom-design Arc A770 products based on its key gamer-focused brands. The first of these is the ASRock A770 Phantom Gaming OC. This card features a meaty triple-slot Phantom Gaming cooling solution, complete with RGB LED illumination. It should also feature the company's highest state of tuning for the A770. The next of the custom-design cards is the Arc A750 Challenger. This card features clean 2-slot, dual-fan design, and a factory-overclock. It's also likely that ASRock is extending the Challenger OC treatment to the A770.

It's the moment you've been waiting for! (And the moment our teams have been working towards!) The Intel Arc A750 and A770 GPUs will be for sale on October 12th starting at $289 and $329 respectively, with the Arc A770 Limited Edition available for $349. After years of price increases in the massive $200-400 GPU segment, Intel is bringing balance back to the GPU market. Pricing seems to have gone off the deep end and we're working to reel it back in with the Intel Arc A-series GPUs. As we've shown in earlier performance blogs, the Arc A750 and A770 trade blows with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060—a popular mainstream GPU. Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger called out the extreme GPU prices in his Intel Innovation Day 1 keynote, showing that the last four years have seen a nonstop upward trend in prices of mainstream GPUs. By entering the GPU space as a third player, Intel is ready to turn these tides in gamers' favor and disrupt the market.

On average, a new GeForce RTX 3060 will set you back $418. (This number was calculated on Newegg.com, targeting in stock, sold by Newegg, new RTX 3060 cards as of Sept 22, 2022.) Picking up an Intel Arc A750 on October 12th for $289 gets you 53% more performance per dollar on average, or an 8 GB Arc A770 for $329 provides 42% more perf/dollar. Why is that? The Arc A700-series performance beats the 3060 in most modern titles using DirectX 12 or Vulkan APIs and our GPUs aren't far behind in most DX11 games—all for much less cash.

Intel expanded its Arc "Alchemist" desktop graphics card series with the entry-level Arc A310. This GPU has specs that enable Intel's AIB partners to build low-profile graphics cards that are possibly even single-slot, or conventional sized with fanless cooling. The A310 is being pushed as a slight upgrade over the iGPU, and an alternative to cards such as the AMD Radeon RX 6400. Its target user would want to build a 4K or 8K HTPC, or even be a workstation/HEDT user with a processor that lacks integrated graphics, and wants to use a couple of high-resolution monitors. There is no reference board design, but we expect it to look similar to the Arc Pro A40 in dimensions (pictured below), except with full-size DP and HDMI in place of those mDP connectors, and a full-height bracket out of the box.

The A310 is carved out of the 6 nm "ACM-G11" silicon by enabling 6 out of 8 Xe Cores (that's 96 out of 128 EUs, or 768 out of 1,024 unified shaders). You also get 96 XMX units that accelerate AI; and 6 ray tracing units. The GPU runs at 2.00 GHz, compared to 2.10 GHz on the A380. The memory sub-system has been narrowed by a third—you get 4 GB of 15.5 Gbps GDDR6 memory across a 64-bit wide memory interface. In comparison, the A380 has 6 GB of memory across a 96-bit memory bus. The card features a PCI-Express 4.0 x8 host interface, and with its typical power expected to be well under the 75 W-mark, most custom cards could lack any power connectors.

Intel's ambitious XeSS (Xe Super Sampling) performance enhancement formally launched, with the latest "Shadow of the Tomb Raider" patch dated September 27. The patch release notes describes this feature addition as "Added XeSS graphics support for DX12-compatible systems." This means that XeSS not only works in its native XMX code-path for Arc "Alchemist" GPUs, but also the agnostic DP4a code. CapFrameX confirmed that XeSS works with Radeon RX 6000 RDNA2 GPUs, which means the DP4a fallback has been implemented. The XeSS feature-addition to SoTR comes just in time as reviews of the Arc A770 are expected to go live early next month, with availability slated for October 12. You can learn more about XeSS in our older article.

Intel's latest NUC 12 Extreme desktops, codenamed "Serpent Canyon," are up for pre-order. These are the company's first gaming-grade NUCs to pack all-Intel hardware, including the GPU. "Serpent Canyon" combines 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake-H" processors with Arc "Alchemist" discrete GPUs, with options going all the way up to the Arc A770 for graphics, and a Core i7-12700H (6P+8E) for the CPU. In its base configuration with 8 GB (2x 4 GB) DDR4 memory, 256 GB M.2 NVMe storage, i7-12700H processor and Arc A770 graphics; the NUC 12 Extreme can be pre-ordered for £1,499 excluding VAT.

Intel Graphics, in its latest teaser video to the Arc A770 Limited Edition "Alchemist" graphics card, posted detailed renders of the card disassembled. The card features a strictly dual-slot cooling solution that uses an aluminium base-plate and a copper vapor-chamber to pull heat from the various hot components of the PCB. This is conveyed by four flat copper heat pipes through an aluminium fin-stack heatsink, which is ventilated by a pair of 80 mm fans. The cooler and its backplate feature four independent RGB lighting zones—the bores of each of the two fans, a light strip running along the top of the card; and toward the tail-end of the backplate, with a total of 90 LEDs. Intel claims that the maximum noise output of the cooler is 39 dBA.

The PCB is shorter in length than the cooler itself, and is full-height (and no taller). It draws power from a combination of 8-pin and 6-pin PCIe power connectors, which combined with slot-power add up to 300 W. A 6-phase VRM powers the "ACM-G10" GPU, while there are three other VRM phases, which could power the eight GDDR6 memory chips, and other power domains of the card. Display outputs include three standard-size DisplayPort 2.0, and one HDMI 2.1. The card's host interface is PCI-Express 4.0 x16, and although not a system requirement, Intel insists that the card be used on a machine with PCI resizable-BAR enabled.

ASRock Arc A380 Challenger ITX graphics card started selling in Europe. German retailer Mindfactory has it listed at 189€, including taxes (non-referral link), and is ready to ship. This is possibly the first listing of the A380 in the EU. Until now, you needed to import the A380 from China (sold by GUNNIR), or from the US, where the ASRock card has been listed on Newegg for a few weeks now. The ASRock A380 Challenger ITX uses an aluminium monoblock heatsink not unlike Intel CPU HSFs, but ventilated by a noise-optimized single 100 mm fan. The card is 19 cm long, and so bags ITX chops. ASRock is running the A380 at a boost frequency of 2.25 GHz, while the memory ticks at 15.5 Gbps (GDDR6-effective). The card features a single 8-pin PCIe power connector.

Here's the first picture of a custom-design Intel Arc A750 "Alchemist" graphics card, in this case, an ASRock Arc A750 Challenger. ASRock showed the card off at its Tokyo Game Show 2022 booth. The strictly 2-slot thick card appears to have a fairly well-endowed aluminium fin-stack cooling solution featuring a pair of large 100 mm fans. Its cooling solution uses two aluminium fin-stacks skewered by a number of copper heat pipes. The card draws power from two 8-pin PCIe power connectors, and features some illumination in the way of an illuminated Arc logo.

The Arc A750 is based on the same 6 nm "DG2-512" silicon as the A770 Limited Edition—which looks increasingly like an Intel-exclusive that will only be sold in its reference design. While the A770 maxes out the chip with all 32 Xe Cores being enabled (512 EUs, or 4,096 unified shaders), the A750 gets 28 Xe Cores (448 EUs, or 3,584 unified shaders). It also gets 8 GB of 16 Gbps GDDR6 memory across a 256-bit wide memory interface (512 GB/s bandwidth), 448 XMX units (accelerates AI and features like XeSS), and 28 RT units. The reference engine clock of the A750 is set at 2.05 GHz, although it's likely that the ASRock Challenger is a factory-overclocked card.

GUNNIR, one of the launch partners of the Arc "Alchemist" series GPUs in China, released the Arc A380 Index custom-design graphics card. This full-height graphics card features a slightly different cooler shroud design from the company's A380 Photon OC graphics card. The key "feature" here is that the card lacks any power connector, and runs the A380 at reference clock speeds. At stock settings, the TDP of the A380 is rated at 75 W, which means it was always designed for cards with just slot-power. The GUNNIR A380 Index ticks at reference speeds of up to 2.00 GHz engine clock, and 15.5 Gbps (GDDR6-effective) memory. In comparison the A380 Photon OC can go all the way up to 2.46 GHz, but at 92 W, for which it needs that power connector. Available now, the card is priced at RMB ¥1,199 (USD $172).

Intel's accelerated computing group head Raja Koduri, who heads the team behind the Arc "Alchemist" graphics, on late-Sunday, refuted rumors about the company shutting down the Arc graphics product line. Responding to a question to that effect on Twitter, Koduri tweeted "we are shrugging about these rumors as well. They don't help the team working hard to bring these to market, they don't help the PC graphics community..one must wonder, who do they help?..we are still in first gen and yes we had more obstacles than planned to overcome, but we persisted."

Rumors about Intel dropping the axe on Arc have been around for some time now, after repeated delays in getting the products to market, limited regional launches; and gathered steam as Intel closed down the Optane Memory business last quarter. Last week, after Intel presented a less-than-perfect outlook for its processor business hinted that it could exit "other" unprofitable businesses.

Intel on Thursday confirmed that there will be only four Arc "Alchemist" desktop graphics card SKUs in the retail channel, and that it will be led by the A770 Limited Edition, which maxes out the DG2-512 silicon, and features 17.5 Gbps memory across its 256-bit wide memory bus, putting 560 GB/s of memory bandwidth at its disposal. The A750 uses 16 Gbps memory data-rates, and has 512 GB/s of bandwidth. It turns out, that the mid-range A580 features a 256-bit wide memory bus, and not the previously-reported 192-bit, which means it has the same 512 GB/s bandwidth as the A750. The A580 and A750 come with 8 GB of memory, while the A770 tops out with 16 GB.

Intel is preparing to announce a mega games+software bundle for prebuilt-desktops and notebooks that combine 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake" processors and Arc "Alchemist" graphics. The bundle covers select models of 12th Gen Core i5, Core i7, and Core i9 processors, along with Arc A500-series and Arc A700-series graphics. The total retail value of the bundle can be as high as $370.

Among the premium games bundled are "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II" (2022), "Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed," "Gotham Knights," and "Vampire: The Masquerade—Bloodhunt." The Featured Software bundle, from which you can choose 3 out 5, include PowerDirector 365, D5 Render (limited subscription), MAGIX Video Pro X14 (limited subscription), Topaz Gigapixel AI, and XSplit Premium Suite. All the games in the bundle either are or will be optimized for Arc "Alchemist" graphics, and will feature XeSS. All the productivity software included takes advantage of the AI-acceleration capabilities and Hybrid architecture of 12th Gen Core processors. The list of eligible processors and graphics cards are tabled below.