Wednesday, March 30th 2022
Intel Formally Announces Arc A-series Graphics
For decades, Intel has been a champion for PC platform innovation. We have delivered generations of CPUs that provide the computing horsepower for billions of people. We advanced connectivity through features like USB, Thunderbolt and Wi-Fi. And in partnership with the PC ecosystem, we developed the ground-breaking PCI architecture and the Intel Evo platform, pushing the boundary for what mobile products can do. Intel is uniquely positioned to deliver PC platform innovations that meet the ever-increasing computing demands of professionals, consumers, gamers and creators around the world. Now, we take the next big step.
Today, we are officially launching our Intel Arc graphics family for laptops, completing the Intel platform. These are the first discrete GPUs from our Intel Arc A-Series graphics portfolio for laptops, with our desktop and workstation products coming later this year. You can visit our Newsroom for our launch video, product details and technical demos, but I will summarize the highlights of how our Intel Arc platform and A-Series mobile GPU family will deliver hardware, software, services and - ultimately - high-performance graphics experiences.
Today marks the first step in our journey. You'll see Intel Arc graphics continue to improve and evolve, with new features and an ever-expanding ecosystem coming throughout the year. And for desktop enthusiasts, our Intel Arc graphics add-in-cards will be coming this summer.
We are excited, and we hope you are too. It's going to be a big year for Intel Arc graphics.
The complete slide-deck follows.
Today, we are officially launching our Intel Arc graphics family for laptops, completing the Intel platform. These are the first discrete GPUs from our Intel Arc A-Series graphics portfolio for laptops, with our desktop and workstation products coming later this year. You can visit our Newsroom for our launch video, product details and technical demos, but I will summarize the highlights of how our Intel Arc platform and A-Series mobile GPU family will deliver hardware, software, services and - ultimately - high-performance graphics experiences.
- New Laptops with Intel Arc Graphics: We've partnered with top OEMs to co-engineer an amazing lineup of laptops that feature new and improved gaming and content creation capabilities with Intel Arc graphics and 12th Gen Intel Core processors. Many new systems with Intel Arc 3 graphics will feature the Intel Evo platform's trademark responsiveness, battery life and Wi-Fi 6 connectivity in thin-and-light form factors. Laptops with Intel Arc 3 graphics offer enhanced 1080p gaming and advanced content creation, and those with Intel Arc 5 and Intel Arc 7 graphics will offer the same cutting-edge, content-creation capabilities coupled with increased graphics and computing performance. The first laptops with Intel Arc 3 GPUs are available to preorder now and will be followed by the more powerful designs with Intel Arc 5 and Intel Arc 7 graphics in early summer.
- Unleashing the Laptop Platform: The foundation of products with Intel Arc A-Series GPUs and our platform-level approach to graphics innovation starts with our new Xe High Performance Graphics microarchitecture (Xe HPG), which is engineered for gamers and creators. We have packed a ton of great technology into Xe HPG, including powerful Xe-cores with Intel XMX AI engines, a graphics pipeline optimized for DirectX 12 Ultimate with hardware acceleration for ray tracing, the Xe Media Engine tuned to accelerate existing and future creator workloads and the Xe Display Engine ready for DisplayPort 2.0 UHBR 10.
- Intel Xe Matrix Extensions (XMX) AI engines provide more compute capability for accelerating AI workloads. These AI engines have 16 times the compute to complete AI inferencing operations when compared to traditional GPU vector units, which can increase performance in productivity, gaming and creator applications.
- Xe Super Sampling (XeSS) is our solution that leverages the power of Intel Arc graphics' XMX AI-engines to deliver high-performance, AI-accelerated upscaling. XeSS is a novel upscaling technology that uses deep learning to synthesize images that are very close to the quality of native high-res rendering. XeSS is coming in the summer and will be supported on all products with Arc A-Series graphics.
- Intel Arc A-Series GPUs are the first in the industry to offer full AV1 hardware acceleration, including both encode and decode, delivering faster video encode and higher quality streaming while consuming the same internet bandwidth. We've worked with industry partners to ensure that AV1 support is available today in many of the most popular media applications, with broader adoption expected this year. The AV1 codec will be a game changer for the future of video encoding and streaming.
- We've integrated Intel Deep Link technologies to enable Intel Arc GPUs to work seamlessly with Intel CPUs and integrated graphics for a performance improvement across gaming, creating and streaming workloads. Intel Deep Link enables dynamic power sharing, intelligently distributing power across the platform to increase application performance up to 30% in creation and compute-intensive applications. With Hyper Encode and Hyper Compute, Deep Link allows multi-engine acceleration in transcoding and AI tasks. More details are available in our product fact sheet.
- Community Experiences: Our Intel Arc graphics are more than another piece of hardware in your PC. They are your portal to play and create. We have a dedicated team focused on delivering Day 0 game-ready drivers, which you'll be able to track in our new Intel Arc Control interface, an all-in-one hub that puts you in full control of the gaming experience. Intel Arc Control includes custom performance profiles, built-in streaming, a virtual camera, integrated Game ON driver downloading, automatic game capture, and more. The app supports Intel Iris Xe graphics and Intel Arc GPUs for a unified software experience. By working with our developer partners, we are making a growing portfolio of Intel-optimized games and multimedia applications available to discrete graphics customers through special launch bundles. Bundles will vary based on the system and the region, but the first of these gamer and creator bundles is rolling out in April with the launch of our A-Series mobile products. Our goal is to deliver something new and fun to the community every day of the year. We invite you to connect with us and join the conversation on our Intel Insiders discord.
Today marks the first step in our journey. You'll see Intel Arc graphics continue to improve and evolve, with new features and an ever-expanding ecosystem coming throughout the year. And for desktop enthusiasts, our Intel Arc graphics add-in-cards will be coming this summer.
We are excited, and we hope you are too. It's going to be a big year for Intel Arc graphics.
The complete slide-deck follows.
53 Comments on Intel Formally Announces Arc A-series Graphics
If this still holds true, then it's in the 1050 Ti range or around the new 6000 series APUs from AMD. I'm using TPU's review of the 1050 Tifor my estimate.
Its the same full 96EU iGPU from intel slides**
It's not like then Gen 6 NVENC in Turing/Ampere cards is 50 times faster than a modern competent processor either... those claims do give me some eerie vibes from the earliest days of GPU-processed video coding, remember Badaboom? I feel old. :eek:
Even if so, I can't wait to see my favorite e-thot's mascara mistakes in glorious 4K at 10Mbps! Gotta preserve bandwidth, hence preserve data plan, hence save more money to donate as simping!
Somewhere at the beginning of the presentation they show some NLE timeline and then Adobe photoshop i think, this indicates Intel could've beefed up media engine to decode files like 4k 120fps, 8k 30,60fps.... and better support for Adobe.
Right now windows laptops are a joke for photo/video content creation compared to Apple, they consume a lot of power and get beaten by super thin and light apple laptops, even Full Tower computers with rtx 3090 and 5950x can't match apple m1 timeline playback in video editing programs, it's getting ridiculous.
Apple proRes is not hard at all to decode, Apple m1 shines with long gop codecs and files like 8k 30fps from Canon R5, Sony a7s III 4k 120fps, GH6 5.7k, they are perfectly smooth on apple M1 laptop, 5950x and a rtx3090 not smooth at all.
If this is not addressed ASAP then Intel and Nvidia can kiss goodbye to that crowd, 10-20W laptop beats 500W or more Full tower computer, one does it brute force and one does it with dedicated hardware.
As for how Apple handles those other codecs, that's that hardware/software optimization I'm talking about. They've got several decades worth of experience in optimizing for media playback, encoding, and editing. This has been a core focus for Apple since the 1980s. It's hardly surprising that they vastly outperform competitors that have never shown much of a long-term interest in doing this, and that also lack the full stack integration of Apple. I wouldn't be surprised at all to learn that Apple's decode blocks also accelerate a lot of non-prores codecs that aren't advertised - they ultimately don't need to do so specifically, as long as it works well and their target audience knows it. But of course they've also got some serious software/OS chops here - they managed to make Final Cut vastly outperform Premiere and other competitors on Intel Macs after all.
I completely agree that both Intel and AMD need to step up their hardware acceleration game, but they've got a significant hurdle there: their target markets are much more diverse, which makes it all the harder to justify the die area required by large hardware accelerator arrays that only serve a relatively small niche of that market. Apple of course sells to a lot of people beyond media professionals, but those are their core audience, and they really don't care about anyone else when it comes to Macs - which can be seen in a lot of their hardware choices. They would be fine if everyone else just had an iPhone, and left the Mac to the professionals.I don't disagree - and the first DG1 implementations were marketed only towards media production, after all - but remember that these are low-end comparisons, in a market where iGPUs are much more powerful than 1-2 years ago. Most likely they expected a bigger difference when these designs were first made, but even still, the larger Arc GPUs are likely to go far past this level (unless they've really messed up the design).
At least that part of the market would be wiped out. (AMD APUs are already beating that for quite some time, now Intel will)
The "serious laptop market" if you mean laptops wielding 6800XT/3080 like GPUs, is just a small fraction of the market, most is on crap like MX and 1650. All that is now threatened by Intel. (and, mind you, nice discount if CPU+GPU bundle is used, is a given)
HDMI 2.0 is disappointing (at least they were honest instead of slapping the now allowed 2.1 sticker) but they can offer 2.1 ports with converters from the DisplayPort connectors. I also question if this is just for the laptop market and again in the Desktop cards things will be different (in laptops they need to deal with the connection to/from the igp and/or a mux which might be the limiting factor).
If someone shoots ProRes they are gonna color grade and once you start to heavily color grade your footage then RTX 3090s makes sense.You talk like this is something very complicated that can't be done, it's very simple, they just need the hardware to decode those files so they play in real time, you can find that hardware even in cheap android phones, even in cameras that actually shoot that footage at 8k, they have silicon dedicated so you can play that file in camera in real time.
They didn't do this until now because it's dedicated silicon space for just that, rather brute force it at 300W than reserving silicon space for dedicated media engine that can decode at 5-10W.
Also as an editor, i just need that file to play in real time at full resolution when i edit it, i don't need it to play at 10x.
Vegas Pro, which was under Sony Creative Software for a very long time before it was acquired by Magix, also supports(ed? out of the loop here) a whole host of Sony-specific codecs used by their high-end cinema cams and many film industry standards, so I would guess that it's just a thing of the trade.
[USER=171585]Valantar[/USER]
Did you ever shoot ProRes ? you get huge files for a few seconds of footage, it's insane.Latest Panasonic GH6 has internal ProRes, 5.7k 25p 422 at 1.6Gbps.
What i want to say is that most people don't care about ProRes hardware decoding, the majority of youtubers , event and corporate videographers, it's all h.264 and h.265, maybe 10 bit for a bit more data.
No doubt beefy GPUs coming to the discreet desktop space. Couldn't care less if Intel competes in the very high end, as long as it's competitive in whatever performances brackets those products end up in.
And, for the record, I think you're really underestimating the ubiquity of ProRes. Is it mainly for professionals? Absolutely. Is it also used by pretty much anyone with access to it who wants to do color grading or other advanced editing, or want to preserve the full dynamic range of their shots? Again, yes. HEVC or other compressed codecs, even when recording in some kind of log color format, lose way too much information for most videographers I've met who have some kind of artistic ambition. They could no doubt mostly do what they do 95-99% as well without ProRes, but they still use ProRes. It being a widely accepted industry standard is also a huge draw in this regard.