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Intel Posts Disassembly and PCB Shots of Arc A770 Limited Edition

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 "Alchemist" Finally Available in Europe, for 189€

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.

ASRock Arc A750 Challenger Graphics Card Pictured

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 Intros Arc A380 Index Graphics Card without Power Connector

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).

MSI Low-Profile Arc A380 Graphics Card Pictured

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 Raja Koduri Refutes Rumors About Company Cancelling Arc Graphics

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 Finalizes Arc A770 Specs to Feature 17.5 Gbps Memory

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.

Resizable-BAR a Must for Arc "Alchemist," Stick with Other Vendors if you Lack it: Intel

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 Details its Ray Tracing Architecture, Posts RT Performance Numbers

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.

Arc A770 Ray Tracing Competitive to or Better Than the RTX 3060: Intel at IFA Berlin

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 ExpertBook Lineup Expands with First Mobile Workstation and Lightest 16" Business Laptop

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 Arc A380 Challenger Listed on Newegg for $139

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 Releases Arc 30.0.101.3268 Beta Drivers with Dozens of Fixes

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 Detects 43 GPU Driver Bugs... By Watching a Review Video

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 Hits AotS Benchmark Database, Roughly Matches RTX 3050

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.

Flagship Intel Arc A770 GPU Showcased in Blender with Ray Tracing and Live Denoising

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.

Intel Xe iGPUs and Arc Graphics Lack DirectX 9 Support, Rely on API Translation to Play Older Games

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.

Intel Asks Xe-HPG Scavenger Hunt Winners to Accept a CPU In Lieu of Graphics Card

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.

Intel GPU Business in a $3.5 Billion Hole, Jon Peddie Recommends Sell or Kill

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 Introduces First Protections Against Certain Physical Threats

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 Unveils Arc Pro Graphics Cards for Workstations and Professional Software

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.

Intel Arc Board Partners are Reportedly Stopping Production, Encountering Quality Issues

According to sources close to Igor Wallossek from Igor's lab, Intel's upcoming Arc Alchemist discrete graphics card lineup is in trouble. As the anonymous sources state, certain add-in board (AIB) partners are having difficulty adopting the third GPU manufacturer into their offerings. As we learn, AIBs are sitting on a pile of NVIDIA and AMD GPUs. This pile is decreasing in price daily and losing value, so it needs to be moved quickly. Secondly, Intel is reportedly suggesting AIBs ship cards to OEMs and system integrators to start the market spread of the new Arc dGPUs. This business model is inherently lower margin compared to selling GPUs directly to consumers.

Last but not least, it is reported that at least one major AIB is stopping the production of custom Arc GPUs due to quality concerns. What this means is yet to be uncovered, and we have to wait and see which AIB (or AIBs) is stepping out of the game. All of this suggests that the new GPU lineup is on the verge of extinction, even before it has launched. However, we are sure that the market will adapt and make a case for the third GPU maker. Of course, these predictions should be taken with a grain of salt, and we await more information to confirm those issues.

ASRock Launches the Intel Arc A380 Challenger Graphics Card in the PRC

The second company to launch an Intel Arc A380 graphics card is somewhat surprisingly, if already rumoured, ASRock. The card in question goes under the somewhat awkward name of Intel Arc A380 Challenger ITX 6GB OC or A380 CLI 6GO for short. Unlike the Gunnir card, this is a rather compact, Mini-ITX friendly card that measures 190 x 124 x 39 mm and sports a single fan. Despite its diminutive size, it's still a dual slot card and ASRock outfitted it with a single 8-pin PCIe power connector, just as Gunnir did with its card.

The base frequency is somewhat higher at 2250 MHz vs. 2000 MHz for the Gunnir card, although ASRock doesn't mention the boost clock on its website. As the name implies, the card comes with 6 GB of GDDR6 memory with a rated data rate of either 15 or 15.5 Gbps, as both numbers are mentioned by ASRock, still on a 96-bit bus. The card has a single HDMI 2.0b port and three DisplayPort 2.0 ports with DSC. The card obviously has a PCIe 4.0 x8 interface as well. ASRock has implemented a 0dB mode where the fan stops spinning during low loads. According to Videocardz, the ASRock Intel Arc A380 Challenger ITX 6GB OC is already on sale in the PRC for the equivalent of US$192.

Intel's Day-0 Driver Updates Now Limited to Xe-based iGPUs and Graphics Cards

Intel Graphics, with its latest Graphics Drivers 31.0.101.3222, changed the coverage of its latest driver updates. The company would be providing game optimizations and regular driver updates only for its Gen12 (Iris Xe), and Arc "Alchemist" graphics products. Support for Gen9, Gen9.5, and Gen11 iGPUs integrated with 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th generations of Intel processors, namely "Skylake," "Kaby Lake," "Coffee Lake," "Ice Lake," and "Cascade Lake," will be relegated to a separate, quarterly driver update cycle, which only covers critical updates and security vulnerabilities, but not game optimizations.

Intel's regular Graphics Driver cycle that includes Day-0 optimizations timed with new game releases, will only cover the Gen12 Xe iGPUs found in 11th Gen "Tiger Lake," "Rocket Lake," and 12th Gen "Alder Lake" processors; besides the DG1 Iris Xe graphics card; and Arc "Alchemist" discrete GPUs. Version 31.0.101.3222 appears to be a transitioning point, and so it has drivers from both branches included within a 1.1 GB package (the main branch supporting game optimizations for new GPUs, and the legacy branch for the older iGPUs). You can grab this driver from here.

Supermicro Launches Multi-GPU Cloud Gaming Solutions Based on Intel Arctic Sound-M

Super Micro Computer, Inc., a global leader in enterprise computing, storage, networking, and green computing technology, is announcing future Total IT Solutions for availability with Android Cloud Gaming and Media Processing & Delivery. These new solutions will incorporate the Intel Data Center GPU, codenamed Arctic Sound-M, and will be supported on several Supermicro servers. Supermicro solutions that will contain the Intel Data Center GPUs codenamed Arctic Sound-M, include the 4U 10x GPU server for transcoding and media delivery, the Supermicro BigTwin system with up to eight Intel Data Center GPUs, codenamed Arctic Sound-M in 2U for media processing applications, the Supermicro CloudDC server for edge AI inferencing, and the Supermicro 2U 2-Node server with three Intel Data Center GPUs, codenamed Arctic Sound-M per node, optimized for cloud gaming. Additional systems will be made available later this year.

"Supermicro will extend our media processing solutions by incorporating the Intel Data Center GPU," said Charles Liang, President, and CEO, Supermicro. "The new solutions will increase video stream rates and enable lower latency Android cloud gaming. As a result, Android cloud gaming performance and interactivity will increase dramatically with the Supermicro BigTwin systems, while media delivery and transcoding will show dramatic improvements with the new Intel Data Center GPUs. The solutions will expand our market-leading accelerated computing offerings, including everything from Media Processing & Delivery to Collaboration, and HPC."
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