The recently announced Intel Arc A350M mobile graphics card is now shipping with it's recent debut in the South-Korean exclusive Samsung Galaxy Book2 Pro laptop. The A350M is the entry-level Arc Alchemist skew from Intel featuring an ACM-G11 GPU with 768 shaders and 4 GB of GDDR6 video memory. This specific Samsung Galaxy Book2 Pro model is also equipped with an Intel Core i5-1240P Alder Lake processor and 16 GB of LPDDR5 memory. The Intel video drivers (30.0.101.132) included with the laptop appear to have issues correctly identifying the card however newer versions are available which should address this.

The laptop was tested in various synthetic and gaming scenarios with the Arc A350M (30 W) performing anywhere from 40% to 60% faster than the NVIDIA MX450 (25 W). The Intel A350M reached a maximum boost clock of 2.2 GHz during gaming with the card offering adequate performance in eSports and older titles. The Galaxy Book2 Pro model with 32 GB of memory and a 1 TB SSD (NT950XEE-XD72S) is currently available to purchase directly from Samsung Korea for 2,520,000 KRW (2,054 USD). Intel has noted that more laptops featuring Arc Alchemist mobile graphics should be launching worldwide in the coming weeks.

Intel in March 2022 kicked off its ambitious campaign to grab a slice of the consumer graphics market, with its Arc "Alchemist" line of discrete GPUs, based on the Xe-HPG graphics architecture. The announcement mentioned an immediate availability of at least the entry-level Arc 3-series GPU models in notebooks generally available. These GPU models include the Arc A350M and Arc A370M. People on social media are beginning to ask Intel why these notebooks are nowhere in sight, and the company responded.

In response to one such query by a user, Intel Support stated that laptops with Arc will be available "by the end of the second quarter of 2022." This would put general availability in June 2022, two months from now. Interestingly, this hasn't stopped laptop manufacturers from raking in pre-orders, with the likes of the Acer Swift X and Samsung Galaxy Book2 Pro up for "grabs." You can "purchase" the Swift X, but shipping dates are stated to be as late as May 23 (now pushed to June 13).

HotHardware did a video interview with Intel Fellow Tom Petersen, who briefly teased a prototype Intel Arc "Alchemist" graphics card with three 8-pin PCIe power connectors, for a total power input capability of 450 W. This does not necessarily mean that a finished product will ship with three connectors; as prototype motherboards and graphics cards are known to feature various redundant connectivity and power-input options for product developers to test capabilities. The three connectors are spaced far apart from each other, so it's likely that the board tests various combinations of power inputs. One of the three could even be a 224 W EPS instead of a 150 W PCIe. The Arc "Alchemist" 7-series desktop board that maxes out the DG2-512 silicon, has been grinding through the rumor mill for quite some time now, including PCB pictures, showing two 8-pin PCIe power connectors.

Intel's recently announced Arc "Alchemist" line of discrete gaming graphics processors consists of at least five mobile SKUs across the Arc 3, Arc 5, and Arc 7 lines; with desktop SKUs expected later this year. These are based on one of two ASICs—the DG2-128 (ACM-G11) and the DG2-512 (ACM-G10), both built on the TSMC N6 (6 nm) silicon fabrication process. Coelacanth's Dream discovered a third ASIC when digging through Intel Graphics Compiler code on GitHub, referred to as the "ACM-G12."

This silicon has exactly half the amount of number-crunching machinery as the DG2-512, and features 256 execution units (EU), or 16 Xe cores, working out to 2,048 unified shaders—double that of the DG2-128, but half that of the DG2-512. Interestingly, the Arc 5 A550M mobile GPU announced last week has specifications corresponding to this silicon, even though it was announced to be a heavily cut-down DG2-512. Intel probably figures that at some point making A550M GPUs using DG2-512 could mean cutting down perfectly functional silicon, and so it makes sense to manufacture physically smaller dies (more dies per wafer). There are no other known specs of the ACM-G12. It's quite likely given the rest of its alignment with the A550M's specs that it could feature a 128-bit wide GDDR6 memory interface.

A few days ago, Intel announced its first official discrete graphics card efforts, designed for laptops. Called the Arc Alchemist lineup, Intel has designed these SKUs to provide entry-level to high-end options covering a wide range of use cases. Today, AMD has responded with a rather exciting Tweet made by the company's @Radeon Twitter account. The company compared Intel's Arc Alchemist A370M GPU with AMD's Radeon RX 6500M mobile SKUs in the post. These GPUs are made on TSMC's N6 node, feature 4 GB GDDR6 64-bit memory, 1024 FP32 cores, and have the same configurable TDP range of 35-50 Watts.

Below, you can see AMD's benchmarks of the following select games: Hitman 3, Total War Saga: Troy, F1 2021, Strange Brigade (High), and Final Fantasy XIV. The Radeon RX 6500M GPU manages to win in all of these games, thus explaining AMD's "FTW" hashtag on Twitter. Remember that these are vendor-supplied benchmarks runs, so we have to wait for some media results to surface.

XeSS is arguably the most boasted-about new graphics technology by Intel. A performance enhancement that is functionally similar to AMD FSR or NVIDIA DLSS, XeSS will instrumental in making Arc "Alchemist" GPUs offer high performance with minimal loss to image quality, especially given that Intel's first crack at premium gaming GPUs also happens to include real-time ray tracing support, to meet DirectX 12 Ultimate specs.

Intel announced that XeSS won't be debuting with the Arc 3 series mobile GPUs that launched yesterday (March 30), but instead alongside the Arc 5 and Arc 7 series slated for early-Summer (late-May to early-June). At launch, several AAA titles will be optimized for XeSS, including "Ghostwire: Tokyo," "Death Stranding," "Anvil," "Hitman III," "GRID Legends," etc.

Intel is preparing to debut the Arc "Alchemist" line of graphics processors with a mobile-first approach, where the company leverages its bulletproof relations with notebook manufacturers to use its discrete mobile GPUs to go with their 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake" processors. These will be launch in two tranches, with the first round expected as early as today (March 30), according to a VideoCardz report citing a leaked company slide. The series will debut with the Arc 3 series of entry-level discrete GPUs, before moving onto the mid-range Arc 5 and premium Arc 7 series "early summer" (we read that as May-June, 2022).

The entire lineup of Arc "Alchemist" is based on two ASICs, the smaller one is the ACM-G11, or DG2-128; while the larger one is the ACM-G10, or DG2-512. The former comes with 128 execution units (EU), while the larger one has 512 EU. The Arc 3 series, consisting of the A350M and A370M, come with 96 and 128 EU (768 and 1,024 unified shaders), respectively, The mid-range Arc A550M is based on the lowest trim of the DG2-512, with half its EU count disabled (256 EU, or 2,048 shaders). The Arc A730M has three-fourths of the EU count enabled, while the A770M maxes it out.

The Intel Arc A370M was put through the "Ashes of the Singularity" benchmark. In two separate runs, the GPU ended up with a score of 3500 and 3600 points in the "Min_1080p" configuration, with an average framerate of 67 FPS in the normal batch. The notebook test-platform this chip ran on consisted of a Core i7-12700H processor, and 32 GB of memory.

3500 points is a rather vague score for this benchmark, given that GPUs from a wide range of market segments attained the similar scores (albeit on very different CPU and memory configurations). The A370M is expected to be SKU that maxes out the smaller DG2 ASIC that physically features 128 execution units (1,024 unified shaders), and a 64-bit wide GDDR6 memory bus holding 4 GB of memory. This A370M should offer roughly twice the performance as the Iris Xe iGPU with 96 EUs found in quad-core "Tiger Lake" mobile processors.

We recently reported on the unnamed discrete Intel Arc Alchemist GPU found in the upcoming Samsung Galaxy Book2 Pro. That listing has now been removed but Finnish retailer Proshop has posted two models of the upcoming Acer Swift X laptop featuring Intel Arc A370M graphics cards. The listings include a Core i5-1240P and Core i7-1260P model each featuring 16 GB of LPDDR5 memory and an Intel Arc A370M GPU available to pre-order for 1299 EUR and 1549 EUR respectively.

The Intel Arc A370M is based on the DG2-128EU GPU and is expected to feature 4 GB of VRAM on a 64-bit memory bus. The Intel Arc Alchemist discrete mobile graphics cards will be officially unveiled by Intel on March 30th with claims of a 2x performance improvement from the integrated 96EU Iris-XE GPU found in the Core i7-12700H. The Acer Swift X laptops are listed by Proshop as not being available until May 25th almost 2 months after the official announcement.

Intel's Arc discrete lineup of graphics card are set to hit the notebook/laptop segment first, and today's discovery is no different. BHPhotoVideo, one of the largest US tech retailers, has posted a listing of Samsung's Galaxy Book2 Pro laptop, spotting Intel's Arc discrete graphics solution. According to the listing, this model was spotting an undisclosed Intel Arc Graphics, 2.1 GHz 12-core CPU, 16 GB of LPDDR5-6400 memory, 512 GB of NVMe PCIe Gen4 storage, 15.6-inch 1080p AMOLED display, WiFi-6E, and came in just 1.13 KG body weight. All of this is packed at 1349.99 USD, which is an early sign of the structure of laptop prices carrying Intel's Arc GPUs.

BHPhotoVideo has now taken down the website listing; however, we still have evidence thanks to the leaker, which you can see below. For more information regarding the exact SKU and more Arc Alchemist data, we have to wait for the March 30th launch.

"Join us on March 30th at 8 A.M. Pacific Time to see Intel Arc graphics take center stage and get a first look at our new discrete graphics for laptops." - is the statement that Intel posted on its website regarding the launch of its upcoming Arc Alchemist GPUs for laptops. While we await the final reveal of the desktop Arc Alchemist graphics cards, it looks like team blue will give us a very first look at Arc discrete graphics cards for laptops. Regarding the performance numbers, Intel's Lisa Pearce, Vice President and General Manager for the Visual Compute Group, posted a quick performance claim stating that the Intel Arc A370M mobile GPU will feature two-fold performance improvement over integrated GPU designs found in Intel Core i7-12700H processor.

Lisa PearceWhat performance can we expect from the first product to make it to market, the Intel Arc A370M?
The first Intel Arc discrete graphics products to enter the mobile market will enable up to a 2X improvement in graphics performance vs. integrated graphics alone while maintaining similar form factors.
2x performance claim based on average FPS at 1080p Medium with Metro Exodus (DX12) as of March 3, 2022 as the beginning of the disclosure. Intel Arc system: Intel Core i7-12700H processor 14C/20T, 32 GB 4800Mhz system memory, Intel Arc A370M graphics, Windows 11 Pro v10.0.22000, Preproduction driver as of March 2022, total system TDP 40 W. Intel Core system: Intel Core i71280P 14C/20T, 32 GB 4800 MHz system memory, Iris Xe integrated graphics, Windows 11 Pro 21H2 22000.493, Driver version 30.0.101.1029, total system TDP 28 W.

In-person events are slowly getting back together, and Intel is one of the first to grab tech media's attention with the Intel Vision 2022 conference announcement. Schedule for two days in a row, May 10th and May 11th, Intel's 2022 Vision conference looks like a teaser for some exciting news. The company is expected to present some business insights, hold keynotes, breakout sessions, technology showcases, demos, and exhibitions from sponsors and partners. It requires registration, which is a paid fee of $899 until April 11th, and $1499 after that for in-person seats; however, it is free for digital visitors.

Earlier today, we reported about Intel's plans to release Arc Alchemist discrete graphics card lineup sometime between May and June, so this could be one of the days the company selects for official product launch. We are still not sure about that, so please take those thoughts with a grain of salt. Be sure to tune in and see what Intel plans to do in the future.

Intel is reportedly targeting early-Summer (May-June) for the launch of its ambitious attempt at AAA gaming graphics cards for desktops, the Arc "Alchemist" series, based on the Xe-HPG graphics architecture, according to a report by Igor's Lab. Product launches are expected anywhere between May 2 and June 1, so one could expect some market availability within Summer. The Arc "Alchemist" series is designed to be sold through a handful board partners Intel already has strong industry relations with. The Arc "Alchemist" lineup will initially target four market segments, including the performance segment, meant for maxed out AAA gaming, with XeSS possibly even enabling 4K Ultra HD gameplay. Intel's entry to the gaming graphics space is expected to introduce an element of competitive pressure against both NVIDIA and AMD, as the company has the financial muscle to keep investing in this market if it tastes success with "Alchemist."

It seems that someone at Intel forgot to press "post" on the company's promised day-0 driver update for one of this year's most anticipated games - Elden Ring. The company previously announced a partnership with Elden Ring developer FromSoftware in the development of an updated driver that wold give Intel-based Elden Ring players streamlined performance and a (hopefully) bug-free experience when it comes to graphics rendering. But Elden Ring's launch day of February 24th has come and gone - and Intel is mum on where exactly its updated driver lies. For now, the latest available Intel graphics driver stands at version 101.1121 - released in November last year.

It may be the case that the driver development hit an unexpected snag, or perhaps Intel has simply opted to delay the driver's launch until there are actually some discrete-level graphics cards available for purchase - the company's initial Arc Alchemist lineup is expected to be announced and launched later this month. That would make sense - especially considering how a driver update this close to release might include some interesting data on the upcoming graphics cards that could be pursued by data miners. Even so, it doesn't seem like a good PR move for Intel to have loudly promised an updated driver and then fail to release it - especially as Intel's uphill battle in the discrete GPU market is just beginning. Perhaps the driver developers are having too much fun with the critically and consumer-acclaimed latest installment from FromSoftware?

SiSoftware put out the mother lode of information on Intel's upcoming Arc "Alchemist" gaming graphics card series, along with OpenCL compute performance of the entry-level Arc A380. The Arc series model numbering is "A" (Alchemist) followed by a number series. The A300 series makes up the entry-mainstream; the A500 series makes up the mid-performance segment; and the A700 series leads the pack with high-end SKUs. The "Alchemist" GPUs are built on the 7 nm silicon fabrication node at TSMC, the N7.

The A300 series is based on the smaller "Alchemist" series dies, with 128 EUs (execution units), which work out to 1,024 programmable shaders. The A500 series and A700 series appear to be carved out from the larger silicon. The A500 series has roughly 384 EU or 3,072 shaders. The top-dog A700 series has all 512 EU or 4,096 shaders enabled. Intel is tapping into industry-standard GDDR6 for dedicated graphics memory. The A300-series SKUs typically have 6 GB of 14 Gbps-rated memory across a 96-bit wide memory bus, for 192 GB/s of bandwidth. The A500 series parts have 12 GB of 16 Gbps-rated memory across a 192-bit bus, for 384 GB/s of bandwidth. The top A700 series maxes out the 256-bit memory bus with 16 GB of memory at 16 Gbps data-rate, for 512 GB/s bandwidth.

Intel plans to ship no less than 4 million discrete GPUs in 2022, the company stated in its Investor Meeting 2022 presentation. The Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group (AXG), headed by Raja Koduri, announced this bold target. The company announced a Q1-2022 debut of its ambitious new Arc "Alchemist" discrete GPU for notebooks (before April). This is to be followed by a desktop debut in Q2-2022 (before July), before a professional-visualization (workstation-class) debut in Q3 (before October). All put together, the company plans to ship over 4 million discrete GPUs over the year.

Intel announced over 50 design wins for OEMs and "AICs." This is big, as it denotes that Arc "Alchemist" graphics cards won't just be sold in the OEM/SI channel, but also the DIY retail channel. Among the familiar brands in the DIY space from the Intel slide are ASUS, MSI, and GIGABYTE. The company is working with over 100 software-ecosystem partners or ISVs, to optimize their current and upcoming applications and games, for the Xe HPG graphics architecture. This includes support for the XeSS performance enhancement (analogous to AMD FSR and NVIDIA DLSS), and DeepLink, a graphics processing resource virtualization tech. Intel plans to launch a new generation of Arc almost every year for the next 3 years, starting with "Alchemist" in 2022, "Battlemage" somewhere around 2023-2024, and "Celestial" after 2024.

At Intel's 2022 investor meeting, the company has presented a technology roadmap update to give its clients an insight into what is to come. Today, team blue announced one of the first discrete data-centric graphics cards in the lineup, codenamed Arctic Sound-M GPU. Based on the DG2 Xe-HPG variation of Intel Xe GPUs, Arctic Sound-M is the company's first design to enter the data center space. The DG2 GPU features 512 Execution Units (EUs), which get passive cooling from the single-slot design of Arctic Sound's heatsink, envisioned for data center enclosures with external airflow.

One of the most significant selling points that Intel advertises is support for hardware-based AV1 encoding standard. This feature allows the card to achieve a 30% greater bandwidth, and it is the main differentiator between consumer-oriented Arc Alchemist GPUs and itself. The card is powered by PCIe power and an 8-pin EPS power connector. Arctic Sound-M is already sampling to select customers and it will become available in the middle of 2022.Below is Intel's teaser video.

At Intel's 2022 Investor Meeting, Chief Executive Officer Pat Gelsinger and Intel's business leaders outlined key elements of the company's strategy and path for long-term growth. Intel's long-term plans will capitalize on transformative growth during an era of unprecedented demand for semiconductors. Among the presentations, Intel announced product roadmaps across its major business units and key execution milestones, including: Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics, Intel Foundry Services, Software and Advanced Technology, Network and Edge, Technology Development, More: For more from Intel's Investor Meeting 2022, including the presentations and news, please visit the Intel Newsroom and Intel.com's Investor Meeting site.

Intel put out a clear, close-up picture of its Arc "Alchemist" gaming graphics card engineering sample. This matches with a picture of the PCB rear shot that surfaced in a report by "Moore's Law is Dead." The picture reveals a PCB that's about 3/4th the length of the cooling solution, with the remainder of the cooler's length being used to directly vent airflow from the back.

The PCB reveals a rectangular pad for the GPU, which corresponds with that of the larger "Alchemist" GPU. This is surrounded by what look like eight GDDR6 memory pads for a 256-bit wide memory interface; at least 10 VRM phases of an unknown configuration; and a power input configuration that's made up of one each of 8-pin and 6-pin PCIe power connectors (capable of delivering 300 W including slot power). The PCB shows traces that connect the GPU to all 16 PCI-Express lanes of the PCIe finger. Display outputs include three full-size DisplayPorts and an HDMI. This particular variant of "Alchemist" is rumored to feature 512 execution units (4,096 unified shaders), and at least in SiSoft SANDRA, it allegedly outperforms the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti "Ampere."

Mesh shader is a relatively new concept of a programmable geometric shading pipeline, which promises to simplify the whole graphics rendering pipeline organization. NVIDIA introduced this concept with Turing back in 2018, and AMD joined with RDNA2. Today, thanks to the finds of Phoronix, we have gathered information that Intel's DG2 GPU will carry support for mesh shaders and bring it under Vulkan API. For starters, the difference between mesh/task and traditional graphics rendering pipeline is that the mesh edition is much simpler and offers higher scalability, bandwidth reduction, and greater flexibility in the design of mesh topology and graphics work. In Vulkan, the current mesh shader state is NVIDIA's contribution called the VK_NV_mesh_shader extension. The below docs explain it in greater detail:

Vulkan API documentationThis extension provides a new mechanism allowing applications to generate collections of geometric primitives via programmable mesh shading. It is an alternative to the existing programmable primitive shading pipeline, which relied on generating input primitives by a fixed function assembler as well as fixed function vertex fetch.

There are new programmable shader types—the task and mesh shader—to generate these collections to be processed by fixed-function primitive assembly and rasterization logic. When task and mesh shaders are dispatched, they replace the core pre-rasterization stages, including vertex array attribute fetching, vertex shader processing, tessellation, and geometry shader processing.

Intel's upcoming Arc Alchemist lineup of discrete graphics cards generates a lot of attention from consumers. Leaks of these cards' performance and detailed specifications appear more and more as we enter the countdown to the launch day, which is sometime in Q1 of this year. Today, we managed to see a slide from @9950pro on Twitter that shows the laptop memory configuration of Intel's DG2 GPU. As the picture suggests, we can see that the top-end SKU1 with 512 EUs supports a 16 GB capacity of GDDR6 memory that runs at 16 Gbps speeds. The memory runs on a 256-bit bus and generates 512 GB/s bandwidth while having eight VRAM modules present.

When it comes to SKU2, which is a variant with 384 EUs, this configuration supports six VRAM modules on a 192-bit bus, running at 16 Gbps speeds. They generate a total capacity of 12 GBs and a bandwidth of 384 GB/s. We have SKU3 DG2 GPU going down the stack, featuring 256 EUs, four VRAM modules on a 128-bit bus, 8 GB capacity, and a 256 GB/s bandwidth. And last but not least, the smallest DG2 variants come in the form of SKU4 and SKU5, feating 128 EUs and 96 EUs, respectively. Intel envisions these lower-end SKUs with two VRAM modules on a 64-bit bus, and this time slower GDDR6 memory running at 14 Gbps. They are paired with 4 GB of total capacity, and the total bandwidth comes down to 112 GB/s.

Intel's Arc Alchemist discrete lineup of graphics cards is scheduled for launch this quarter. We are getting some performance benchmarks of the DG2-512EU silicon, representing the top-end Xe-HPG configuration. Thanks to a discovery of a famous hardware leaker TUM_APISAK, we have a measurement performed in the SiSoftware database that shows Intel's Arc Alchemist GPU with 4096 cores and, according to the report from the benchmark, just 12.8 GB of GDDR6 VRAM. This is just an error on the report, as this GPU SKU should be coupled with 16 GB of GDDR6 VRAM. The card was reportedly running at 2.1 GHz frequency. However, we don't know if this represents base or boost speeds.

When it comes to actual performance, the DG2-512EU GPU managed to score 9017.52 Mpix/s, while something like NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti managed to get 8369.51 Mpix/s in the same test group. Comparing these two cards in floating-point operations, Intel has an advantage in half-float, double-float, and quad-float tests, while NVIDIA manages to hold the single-float crown. This represents a 7% advantage for Intel's GPU, meaning that Arc Alchemist has the potential for standing up against NVIDIA's offerings.

For a significant period, Intel's Next Unit of Computing (NUC) series has featured soldered processors on the PC's motherboard. However, according to the latest leaks from Twitter hardware leaker @9550pro, we have a potential Alder Lake-based NUC featuring desktop processor versions and a dedicated LGA1700 socket. As the leaked image shows, it looks like Intel's NUC 12 Extreme edition will feature an LGA1700 socket that features support for desktop-class of Alder Lake processors. If this leak is correct, we could see a compelling NUC solution filled with Intel-only processors, meaning an Alder Lake CPU and Arc Alchemist discrete graphics card.

There is room for PCIe expansion, which means that theoretically, you could connect any GPU to the mainboard. However, it is natural to assume that Intel could force their own GPU SKUs to launch this mini PC. We have to wait and see what Intel presents at tomorrow's CES 2022 event for more information.

January 4, 2022 could be a date of major product announcements by both AMD and Intel as part of their International CES 2022 plans. Both companies will host virtual press-meets on that day, and are expected to unveil several product lines. AMD could shed more like on its Ryzen "Vermeer-S" Socket AM4 desktop processors, possible updates to its Ryzen 5000 mobile product stack; as well as put out some juicy nuggets of info on its future "Zen 4" processors; while Intel will significantly expand its 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake" family across both its desktop and mobile segments, along with more info on its Arc "Alchemist" gaming GPU. The AMD event is slated for 8 AM Pacific, while the Intel one goes up two hours later, at 10 AM Pacific. We will be live-blogging both.

Intel's Arc Alchemist lineup of graphics cards, based on Xe-HPG GPU configuration, is nearing the launch. With the current situation with AMD and NVIDIA GPUs outputting graphics card prices over the default MSRP, we wonder how Intel would place pricing of its upcoming GPUs and fit inside the market. And today, we got the first round of speculations based on Intel's Arc Alchemist GPU giveaway called Xe-HPG Scavenger Hunt. There are two principal bundles: one worth $900 that includes Intel Arc merchandise, Xbox Game Pass PC for six months, Intel Premium Arc Alchemist graphics card, and one worth $700 that consists of three months of Xbox Game Pass PC, Intel Arc merchandise, and Intel Performance Arc Alchemist graphics card.

According to some preliminary calculations from Tom's Hardware, we assume that with the $900 bundle containing one Premium Arc Alchemist GPU and other prizes, the card will cost as much as $825 when all things get removed. Going down the ladder, Intel has paired a bundle worth $700 with a Performance Arc GPU, which is roughly worth $650 on its own. It indicates that the two Intel Performance and Premium Arch Alchemist graphics cards are respectfully worth $650 and $825. What will the final pricing look like? We don't know. However, we assume that it could be very similar to this. For more information we have to wait for the official launch.