Reviews of the Intel Arc A770 Limited Edition desktop graphics card could hit the web by October 5, according to a VideoCardz report. These could succeed unboxing articles without performance numbers, on September 30. Press reviews of the A770 publishing on October 5 could mean that retail availability isn't too far behind, and we could hear more about this later today at the IntelON Innovation online event, where the company is widely expected to announce its 13th Gen Core "Raptor Lake" desktop processors. The Arc A770 Limited Edition maxes out the 6 nm ACM-G10 silicon, features 32 Xe Cores, 512 XMX matrix processors, and 512 EUs, which work out to 4,096 unified shaders. The card comes with 8 GB or 16 GB of 17.5 Gbps GDDR6 memory across a 256-bit wide memory bus. Given that Intel is extensively comparing the A770 to the GeForce RTX 3070, one can expect a price competitive to that (around $500).

It appears that we're slowly getting closer and closer to the official launch of Intel's upcoming Arc A770 and Arc A750 graphics cards, as Intel's CEO, Pat Gelsinger, just became the proud owner of the first Arc A770 graphics card. According to a tweet by Pat, he "got a surprise delivery on a rainy Sunday evening from @RajaXG", the latter being Raja Koduri. Pat continued "We are now getting first batch of A770 cards ready for retail …excited!".

Intel has yet to reveal a firm launch date for the Arc A770 and Arc A750 graphics cards, but unless the company launches very soon, the boat might very well have sailed for its first generation of new graphics cards. Summer is already long gone (officially summer ends on the 23rd of September), although Intel has its Innovation event coming up on the 27th of this month and it's possible that the company will launch its higher-end Arc graphics cards then, alongside the it's 13th generation of Core desktop CPUs.

Today, Intel announced the Intel NUC 12 Enthusiast Mini PC and Kit (code-named Serpent Canyon). Designed for gamers and content creators, the compact mini-PC is built to include Intel Arc graphics in the smallest form factor. The NUC 12 Enthusiast features the latest 12th Gen Intel Core processors and is the first Intel NUC to include Intel Arc A-series graphics in the form of the Intel Arc A770M graphics processing unit (GPU).

"The Intel NUC 12 Enthusiast Kit is one of the most exciting NUC's to launch because it's the first to pair an Intel processor with discrete Intel graphics. The system provides a strong combination of high performance in content creation and gaming usages, and wide array of I/O - typically found in larger systems - all in a small form-factor design. More importantly, this NUC features helpful technologies like Intel Thread Director and Intel Deep Link that make it perfect for anyone trying to create and game in the convenience of a truly compact design," said Brian McCarson, Intel vice president and general manager of the NUC Group.

In its latest video presentation dealing with the reference board design and overclocking architecture of the Arc A770 Limited Edition graphics card, Intel revealed that the cards should be "monster overclockers," and that they've been able to get their randomly selected card to run at 2.70 GHz (up from 2.10 GHz reference), without the need for custom-cooling, just by using the overclocking controls on the Arc Control software. The cooler has a noise output of up to 39 dBA, and even with the overclocked GPU, Intel claims, the temperatures never crossed the 80-90 °C range. The GPU power was claimed to be around 228 W.

Intel clarified that the "GPU Clock" advertised with the A770 is the guaranteed clock-speed sustained by the GPU at least 50% of the time, even on the "least performing" silicon. The actual clock will vary around this point. This is represented as a bell-curve on top of the voltage-frequency curve of the GPU. There are two ways to go about increasing the performance of the GPU—increasing the voltage, which would increase the clock residency (sustainability of elevated clock-states); and by increasing the frequency itself. Both of these can be accomplished using Arc Control.

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).

Here are the first pictures of a low-profile Intel Arc A380 graphics card by MSI. The half-height card is 2 slots thick, and is probably the first A380 card we've come across that appears to lack a power connector. The card surfaced on Japanese IT news portals, when a DAIV-built commercial desktop was disassembled revealing this low-profile card. The desktop combines a Core i7-12700 with this A380 card. The card appears to feature a complex aluminium fin-stack heatsink instead of a cheap aluminium monoblock one. The typical board power of A380 running at stock frequencies is exactly 75 W, and so MSI could build this card without any power connectors. Other board partners have been known to include at least a 6-pin connector to minimize power draw from the slot.

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.

The PCI resizable-BAR feature is an absolute must for Intel Arc "Alchemist" graphics cards to perform as advertised, to the extent that Intel recommends sticking to "other vendors" (NVIDIA, AMD), for those on machines that lack resizable-BAR or prefer it disabled. In our testing of the Arc A380, we found a big performance gap between resizable-BAR being enabled and disabled. The company said that while it is working on driver optimizations that improve performance for machines lacking resizable-BAR, its general advice for those on older platforms is to stick with other vendors.

Resizable-BAR enables the software to see the entire video memory of a graphics card as a single large addressable block, rather than through 256 MB apertures. AMD and NVIDIA's driver architectures have optimized their memory-management to cope with these apertures through the advent of PCI-Express, but Intel Arc hasn't. Its memory-management model relies on large bursts of memory transfers, for which it needs resizable-BAR. The performance penalty for lacking it could be as high as 40 percent. In related news, Intel Graphics confirmed that the Arc A770 will be available both in 16 GB and 8 GB memory variants at launch—which is still slated for Soonuary, 2022.

Intel on Thursday posted an article that dives deep into the ray tracing architecture of its Arc "Alchemist" GPUs, which are particularly relevant with performance-segment parts such as the Arc A770, which competes with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060. In the article, Intel posted ray tracing performance numbers that put it at-par with, or faster than the RTX 3060, which which it has traditional raster performance parity. In theory, this would make Intel's ray tracing tech superior to that of AMD RDNA2, because while the AMD chips have raster performance parity, their ray tracing performance do not tend to be at par with NVIDIA parts at a price-segment level.

The Arc "Alchemist" GPUs meet the DirectX 12 Ultimate feature-set, and its ray tracing engine supports DXR 1.0, DXR 1.1, and Vulkan RT APIs. The Xe Core is the indivisible subunit of the GPU, and packs its main number-crunching machinery. Each Xe Core features a Thread Sorting Unit (TSU), and a Ray Tracing Unit (RTU). The TSU is responsible for scheduling work among the Xe Core and RTU, and is the core of Intel's "secret sauce." Each RTU has two ray traversal pipelines (fixed function hardware tasked with calculating ray intersections with intersections/BVH. The RTU can calculate 12 box intersections per cycle, 1 triangle intersection per cycle, and features a dedicated cache for BVH data.

Intel Graphics in an interview with PC Gamer on the sidelines of the 2022 IFA Berlin, claimed that the real-time ray tracing architecture of the Xe-HPG graphics architecture in the Arc A770 "Alchemist" graphics card is "competitive or better than" the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060, and that the company plans to launch the card at an attractive price-point, to grab a slice of the very top of the gaming graphics market bell-curve. The RTX 3060 is a very successful GPU, especially with graphics card prices on the chill, and AMD is already competing with its Radeon RX 6650 XT, which can be spotted at lower prices. The RTX 3060 has been in the crosshairs of Intel Graphics marketing, in recent performance reveals for the A770.

"When you have a title that is optimized for Intel, in the sense that it runs well on DX12, you're gonna get performance that's significantly above an [RTX] 3060," said Tom Petersen with Intel Graphics. "When you have a title that is optimized for Intel, in the sense that it runs well on DX12, you're gonna get performance that's significantly above an [RTX] 3060. And this is A750 compared to a 3060, so 17%, 14%, 10%. It's going to vary of course based on the title," he said. "We're going to be a little bit faster but depending on your game and depending on your settings, it's trading blows, and that's the A750. Obviously, A770 is going to be a little bit faster. So when you add in DX11, you're gonna see our performance is a little less trading blows, and we're kind of behind in some cases, ahead in some cases, but more losses than wins at DX11," he added. While Intel is still non-committal about a launch date, although it stated that the Arc A770 and A750 will launch with an attractive "introductory pricing."

ASUS, a global technology leader renowned for continuously reimagining today's technologies for tomorrow, today announced three new Expert-series laptops, including the ExpertBook B5 (B5602C), ExpertBook B5 Flip (B5602F) and the first Expert Series workstation, the ExpertBook B6 Flip (B6602F). Debuting at IFA 2022 (Hall 11.2, booth 101), the new laptops and mobile workstation offer unrivaled performance and mobility, designed for business users in today's fast-paced world, where work is no longer confined to the office.

ASUS Computer International President Benjamin Yeh said: "The workplace has changed, and it's up to business owners, executives, retailers, and other workers to decide its future. These users are forging the new future of work, and they need tools that work invisibly, reliably and seamlessly day after day. ASUS is known for innovating highly reliable and durable devices for the consumer and gaming markets. Now, with the Expert-series portfolio, we are setting a new standard for the commercial PC market to enable businesses to define their new work style—whatever that might be—with elite performance, premium craftsmanship, durability and enterprise-grade tools."

ASRock's Arc A380 "Alchemist" graphics card is now available for purchase on US retailer Newegg for USD $139.99. The card is sold and shipped by Newegg from the US-based warehouses, and isn't a marketplace listing that imports them from foreign retailers. The ASRock A380 Challenger is a close-to-reference card that runs the A380 at slightly overclocked speeds, draws power from a single 8-pin PCIe power connector, and uses a simple aluminium monoblock fan-heatsink to cool the GPU. Based on the Xe-HPG graphics architecture, the Arc A380 features 1,024 unified shaders, meets DirectX 12 Ultimate API specs (which includes ray tracing), and comes with readiness for the XeSS performance enhancement. The card has 6 GB of GDDR6 memory across a 96-bit memory bus.

Intel Graphics over the weekend released the Arc Graphics Drivers version 30.0.101.3268 beta. These drivers add performance optimization for Saints Row and Madden NFL 23, but that's hardly the defining feature. In our testing, the drivers were found to to be night-and-day compared to the previous version, in terms of overall system stability. The release comes hot on the heels of a report that Intel fixed as many as 43 bugs just by watching a product review video by Gamers Nexus.

Among the fixed issues are lower-than-expected performance with Marvel's Spider Man (Remastered) in DirectX 12 mode; an application crash with SoTR in DirectX 12 mode with ray traced shadow quality set to "high," a texture-corruption issue with Battlefield 2042 in DirectX 12 mode; artifacts and object loading failures seen in Halo Infinite, an application crash with Horizon Zero Dawn, and the nasty bug where Windows Update attempts to replace the installed driver, causing severe stability issues. As many as 17 bugs related to Arc Control and 11 bugs related to Arc Control Performance Tuning, have been fixed, as listed below.

DOWNLOAD: Intel Arc 30.0.101.3268 beta

Intel has been in the firing lines for the consecutive delays and general lack of clarity surrounding the launch of its Arc Alchemist family of discrete GPUs. Staggered availability has meant that the only currently available Arc GPU - the A380 - is still only available in the Chinese market, where the Internet café game is still strong. Intel drivers in particular have been fraught with bugs and as we know, software can bring even the most competent hardware to its knees. So there's maybe an echo of warning bells to the real state of Arc's software suite when Intel admits to having detected 43 different GPU driver bugs... While watching a review video from Gamers Nexus.

We've conducted our own review of Intel's Arc A380 (after importing it from China), and we did call to attention how we "encountered numerous bugs including bluescreens, corrupted desktop after startup, random systems hangs, system getting stuck during shutdown sequences, and more." Only AMD and NVIDIA seem to have an idea on just how complex the matter of breaking into and maintaining a position in this particular product segment takes. Intel itself is still in the process of learning just what that takes, as its own VP and general manager of the Visual Computing Group, Lisa Pearce, penned in a blog post.

Intel Arc A580 is an upcoming entry-mainstream desktop graphics card based on the Xe-HPG "Alchemist" graphics architecture, and positioned between the A380 and A750. Based on the larger 6 nm DG2-512 silicon than the one powering the A380, the A580 is endowed with 16 Xe Cores, or double the SIMD muscle of the A380, with 2,048 unified shaders. The card enjoys 8 GB of GDDR6 memory across a 128-bit bus, which at 16 Gbps data-rate produces 256 GB/s bandwidth.

A leaked Ashes of the Singularity benchmark database entry reveals that the A580 scores roughly 95 FPS at 1080p on average, with 110 FPS in the normal batch, around 102 FPS in the medium batch, and around 78 FPS in the heavy batch. The benchmark used the Vulkan API, and an unknown 16-thread Intel processor with 32 GB of memory. These scores put the A580 roughly at par with the GeForce RTX 3050 "Ampere" in this test, which would make it a reasonable solution for playing popular online games at 1080p with medium-high settings, or AAA games at medium settings.

Intel Arc Alchemist graphics cards span both gamer and creator/professional user market sector, where we witnessed Intel announce gamer and pro-vis GPU SKUs. Today, we are seeing the usage of the flagship Arc Alchemist SKU called A770 in Blender rendering with ray tracing enabled. The GPU is designed to have a DG2-512 GPU with 512 EUs, 4096 Shading Units, 16 GB of GDDR6 memory, and 32 Xe cores for ray tracing, be a powerhouse for games, and handle some professional software as well. At SIGGRAPH 2022, Bob Duffy, Intel's Director of Graphics Community Engagement, showcased a system with Arc A770 GPU running Blender Cycles with ray tracing and denoising.

While we don't have any comparable data to showcase, the system managed to produce a decent rendering in Blender 3.3 LTS release, using Intel's oneAPI. The demo scene had 4,369,466 vertices, 8,702,031 edges, 4,349,606 faces, and 8,682,950 triangles, backed by ray tracing and live denoising. We are yet to see more detailed benchmarks and how the GPU fares against the competition.

So you thought your Arc A380 graphics card, or the Gen12 Xe iGPU in your 12th Gen Core processors were good enough to munch through your older games from the 2000s and early 2010s? Not so fast. Intel Graphics states that the Xe-LP and Xe-HPG graphics architectures, which power the Gen12 Iris Xe iGPUs and the new Arc "Alchemist" graphics cards, lack native support for the DirectX 9 graphics API. The two rely on API translation such as Microsoft D3D9On12, which attempts to translate D3D9 API commands to D3D12, which the drivers can recognize.

Older graphics architectures such as the Gen11 powering "Ice Lake," and Gen9.5 found in all "Skylake" derivatives, feature native support for DirectX 9, however when paired with Arc "Alchemist" graphics cards, the drivers are designed to engage D3D9On12 to accommodate the discrete GPU, unless the dGPU is disabled. API translation can be unreliable and buggy, and Intel points you to Microsoft and the game developers for support, Intel Graphics won't be providing any.

Remember that Xe-HPG Scavenger Hunt that Intel hosted last year? If you somehow missed it, Intel was maybe giving away some Arc graphics cards to 300 lucky winners. There were two different tiers of prizes, grand prize and first prize, which later ended up translating to an Arc A770 and an Arc A750 graphics card respectively. Now news via VideoCardz are suggesting that Intel is trying to get out of giving these 300 people their prize, well, at least the promised graphics card, in exchange for an Alder Lake CPU.

Intel has apparently sent out an email to the winners, asking them to accept an Intel Core i7-12700K if they were a grand prize winner or a Core i5-12600K if they were a first prize winner, instead of the promised graphics card. The winners have until Friday the 19th of August to decide if they want a CPU instead of a GPU, although Intel is apparently still allowing them to wait for a GPU, the company just doesn't say how long the wait will be. As the prize has to have a similar retail price, it's also possible to get a ballpark figure of the MSRP of Intel's supposedly upcoming Arc 700-series graphics cards. The Arc A770 should end up at around the $410 mark and the A750 around the $290 mark, as this is the ballpark MSRP for the CPU's that are being offered. It would be interesting to know how many people would be willing to do the trade, but sadly we're unlikely to ever find out.

Jon Peddie Research (JPR) provides some of the most authoritative and informative market-research into the PC graphics hardware industry. The firm just published a scathing editorial on the future of Intel AXG (Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics), the business tasked with development of competitive discrete GPU and HPC compute accelerators for Intel. Founded to much fanfare in 2016 and led by Raja Koduri since 2016; AXG has been in the news for the development of the Xe graphics and compute architecture, particularly with the Xe-HP "Ponte Vecchio" HPC accelerator; and the Arc brand of consumer discrete graphics solutions. JPR reports that Intel has invested several billions of Dollars into AXG, to little avail, with none of its product lines bringing in notable revenues for the company. Xe-LP based iGPUs do not count as they're integrated with client processors, and their revenues are clubbed with CCG (Client Computing Group).

Intel started reporting revenues from the AXG business since Q1-2021, around which time it started selling its first discrete GPUs as the Intel DG1 Xe MAX, based on the same Xe-LP architecture powering its iGPUs. The company's Xe-HPG architecture, designed for high-performance gaming, was marketed as its first definitive answer to NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon. Since Q1-2021, Intel has lost $2.1 billion to AXG, with not much to show for. The JPR article suggests that Intel missed the bus both with its time-to-market and scale.

Intel improves software reliability by building silicon enhancements realized through logic inside the processor. Today, the company described a new technique to complement existing software mitigations for fault injection attacks. Tunable Replica Circuit (TRC) - Fault Injection Protection uses hardware-based sensors to explicitly detect circuit-based timing failures that occur as the result of an attack. TRC is first delivered in the 12th Gen Intel Core processor family. It adds fault injection detection technology to the Intel Converged Security and Management Engine (Intel CSME), where it is designed to detect non-invasive physical glitch attacks on the pins supplying clock and voltage. TRC is also designed to detect electromagnetic fault injections.

"Software protections have hardened with virtualization, stack canaries and code authentication before execution," said Daniel Nemiroff, senior principal engineer at Intel. "This has driven malicious actors to turn their attention to physically attacking computing platforms. A favorite tool of these attackers is fault injection attacks via glitching voltage, clock pins and electromagnetic radiation that cause circuit timing faults and may allow execution of malicious instructions and potential exfiltration of secrets."

Intel has today unveiled another addition to its discrete Arc Alchemist graphics card lineup, with a slight preference to the professional consumer market. Intel has prepared three models for creators and entry pro-vis solutions, called Intel Arc Pro graphics cards. All GPUs are AV1 accelerated, have ray tracing support, and are designed to handle AI acceleration inside applications like Adobe Premiere Pro. At the start, we have a small A30M mobile GPU aimed at laptop designs. It has a 3.5 TeraFLOP FP32 capability inside a configurable 35-50 Watt TDP envelope, has eight ray tracing cores, and 4 GB of GDDR6 memory. Its display output connectors depend on OEM's laptop design.

Next, we have the Arc A40 Pro discrete single-slot GPU. Having 3.5 TeraFLOPs of FP32 single-precision performance, it has eight ray tracing cores and 6 GB of GDDR6 memory. The listed maximum TDP for this model is 50 Watts. It has four mini-DP ports for video output, and it can drive two monitors at 8K 60 Hz, one at 5K 240 Hz, two at 5K 120 Hz, or four at 4K 60 Hz refresh rate. Its bigger brother, the Arc A50 Pro, is a dual-slot design with 4.8 TeraFLOPs of single-precision FP32 computing, has eight ray tracing cores, and 6 GB of GDDR6 memory as well. It has the same video output capability as the Arc A40 Pro, with a beefier cooling setup to handle the 75 Watt TDP. All software developed using the OneAPI toolkit can be accelerated using these GPUs. Intel is working with the industry to adapt professional software for Arc Pro graphics.