Intel Unveils Arc Pro Graphics Cards for Workstations and Professional Software

[AleksandarK]

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.


View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[Dragokar]

So this is the advanced Larrabee route?

 

[FreedomEclipse]

If their releases of commercial graphics cards is anything to go by. Intel will have a hard time convincing businesses to pick their hardware up. Its specs might be great on paper but all that means nothing if the drivers are terrible - as we have already heard about when it came to the cards intended for the commercial market.

 

[Nanochip]

I thought ARC was cancelled ? Oh yea, rumors are just rumors.

 

[wickerman]

Has anyone done any good testing with Plex encoding with the new Arc gpus? I always see talk of AV1 which is interesting, but would be curious if these can handle more h264 or h265 streams than the typical pascal era Quadro p2000 that a lot of people use. The geforce cards need modded drivers to unlock the nvenc stuff, and AMD doesnt really have a good option for plex that im aware of.

 

[Tropick]

"This just in: Man who jumped off building announces plans to build parachute"

Edit: I totally understand Intel's desire to try and launch into as many spaces as possible but at this point I feel they need to focus a LOT more on fixing the issues inherent to the GPU rather than pouring money into marketing professional versions of the card. The drivers aren't the least bit stable, what makes them think pros (who NEED rock solid drivers) are going to be interested in this at all?

 

[DeathtoGnomes]

If their releases of commercial graphics cards is anything to go by. Intel will have a hard time convincing businesses to pick their hardware up. Its specs might be great on paper but all that means nothing if the drivers are terrible - as we have already heard about when it came to the cards intended for the commercial market.

I agree. Pricing will be a huge factor with the current unproven state of the drivers.

 

[ir_cow]

The thing about the business market is that is a product needs to work 100% of the time. Your paying more because of that. Given how poorly the Arc is for gaming, I wouldn't touch this if my revenue dependent on it.

 

[Ed_1]

The thing about the business market is that is a product needs to work 100% of the time. Your paying more because of that. Given how poorly the Arc is for gaming, I wouldn't touch this if my revenue dependent on it.

There could be an advantage though, my guess is there less software to maybe certify than on the retail market where there is 1000"s of games and apps.
But yeah everyone knew the weak link for a startup GPU company is the drivers.
At least they are separating the drivers from the Igpu HW, two branches now.

 

[Bubster]

Intel should've called this Graphics disaster Arch ... Stanton (The fake treasure grave), from The Good , The Bad and the ugly legendary movie

 

[Daven]

Professional cards? Is this a joke?

 

[bonehead123]

Intel is working with the industry to adapt professional software for Arc Pro graphics.

Ummm....shouldn't this be the other way around....

Does intel really think that pro-level software developers are gonna completely rewrite their software just so it will work with their crapware amateur-level cards and crapware level drivers..... good luck with that

Unless of course they are willing to pony up some of their gazzillions of $$ to pay for the costs of the rewrites, which would not surprise me in the least....

 

[shovenose]

Given that driver support is 99% of what makes a professional graphics card a professional graphics card this is going to be quite interesting.

I think it's great they're going to try to compete with Quadro cards etc. But they have a LONG ways to go from a drivers perspective.

Has anyone done any good testing with Plex encoding with the new Arc gpus? I always see talk of AV1 which is interesting, but would be curious if these can handle more h264 or h265 streams than the typical pascal era Quadro p2000 that a lot of people use. The geforce cards need modded drivers to unlock the nvenc stuff, and AMD doesnt really have a good option for plex that im aware of.

I'm looking forward to see how Arc cards work with Plex myself. Hopefully it has good support for multiple H265 streams!

 

[HD64G]

I thought ARC was cancelled ? Oh yea, rumors are just rumors.

Rumours were only about discussions on high level management in Intel about the future of Arch. Not about anything in near future. So, don't bet about anything yet. I hope Intel makes decent GPUs but data shows things are very difficult for them in this market.

 

[Nanochip]

Rumours were only about discussions on high level management in Intel about the future of Arch. Not about anything in near future. So, don't bet about anything yet. I hope Intel makes decent GPUs but data shows things are very difficult for them in this market.

If they create a good product line for client and professional with stable drivers, they’ll capture some market share. The question is how much market share and also what minimum market share they need to turn a profit.

 

[efikkan]

If their releases of commercial graphics cards is anything to go by. Intel will have a hard time convincing businesses to pick their hardware up. Its specs might be great on paper but all that means nothing if the drivers are terrible - as we have already heard about when it came to the cards intended for the commercial market.

None of the stability issues I've seen described so far affects compute workloads, so they may very well perform just fine.

I thought ARC was cancelled ? Oh yea, rumors are just rumors.

That's the problem we get when people are spreading misinformation.

Intel should've called this Graphics disaster Arch ... Stanton (The fake treasure grave), from The Good , The Bad and the ugly legendary movie

And what did people expect from something called Alchemist? (based on the vast success of the science of alchemy?)
Perhaps they should have named it Hindenburg or Titanic?

Professional cards? Is this a joke?

Nope, you just don't know what professional graphics cards are used for.

Does intel really think that pro-level software developers are gonna completely rewrite their software just so it will work with their crapware amateur-level cards and crapware level drivers..... good luck with that

Unless of course they are willing to pony up some of their gazzillions of $$ to pay for the costs of the rewrites, which would not surprise me in the least....

Why would they have to rewrite anything?
Any software using OpenCL and OpenGL will just work.

 

[qlum]

With the current drivers I do wonder how this would make sense.

 

[Luminescent]

Finally!!!
I actually need one of these cards.
The latest cameras from Sony,Canon,Nikon and others started to use higher bitrate and more advance codecs that curent hardware from Nvidia and AMD just can't decode and doing it on the cpu is very slow, we are talking about 8k h.264 or h.265 at 30fps or 60fps, or 4k 120fps, 8bit, 10 bit , 422, 420, all kinds of flavors and rtx 3090 and 6900xt can't help.
Funny enough, apple M1 can decode these codecs in realtime and consume very little power, fulltower behemoths with 3090's and 16 core cpu's get replaced by tiny apple mac studio.
This could be of great help for video editors, let's hope they don't charge 1000$ because they are "professional".

 

[maxfly]

Other than the obvious short comings. I have one question for Intel. Why?
No creator is going to want these are they? Am I missing something? This has so much potential to go terribly bad for you long term. It makes no sense. Maybe they are giving them away...

Finally!!!
I actually need one of these cards.
The latest cameras from Sony,Canon,Nikon and others started to use higher bitrate and more advance codecs that curent hardware from Nvidia and AMD just can't decode and doing it on the cpu is very slow, we are talking about 8k h.264 or h.265 at 30fps or 60fps, or 4k 120fps, 8bit, 10 bit , 422, 420, all kinds of flavors and rtx 3090 and 6900xt can't help.
Funny enough, apple M1 can decode these codecs in realtime and consume very little power, fulltower behemoths with 3090's and 16 core cpu's get replaced by tiny apple mac studio.
This could be of great help for video editors, let's hope they don't charge 1000$ because they are "professional".

I see. That helps in clarifying. TY.

 

[Fouquin]

Intel's drivers haven't stopped the likes of Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Acer from selling $1,000 business machines with i7s and Intel HD graphics for over a decade. These OEMs will look at this as a very easy way to keep their BOM down by single sourcing from Intel.

 

[Dragokar]

I really would love to see another player, but since I witnessed what Intel did in the last 30 years regarding competition, I doubt that they ever will be a “nice” company that only shines through products. Also, the way that they are going with all the PR and press stunts regarding ARC make me feel unsure if they really can deliver what they promised.

 

[HisDivineOrder]

I really would love to see another player, but since I witnessed what Intel did in the last 30 years regarding competition, I doubt that they ever will be a “nice” company that only shines through products. Also, the way that they are going with all the PR and press stunts regarding ARC make me feel unsure if they really can deliver what they promised.

There are no "nice companies that only shines through products." Your first mistake was looking for "nice" companies.

 

[Dragokar]

There are no "nice companies that only shines through products." Your first mistake was looking for "nice" companies.

Nah not really, there are nice companies, decent ones and really shady ones that also got sued in the past for that.

There is or mostly was a concept of companies actually caring about their customers and employees, but that is mostly gone thanks to greed and human degeneration.

 

[erek]

This is super disappointing as the RV770 from 2007/8 achieved 1.2TFLOPs on launch and was obtainable for $169 brand new (I know from experience).

RV770 has 800 SPs, breaks 1.2TFLOPS, final clocks

http://www.nordichardware.com/news,7841.html Remember how we told you that Eastern sources claimed that RV770 has 800 shader processors, not just 480 shader processors? When we look at the slide presented to us by a reliable source, we can only conclude that they were right. AMD evidently...

forums.tomshardware.com

 

[quiq]

proffesional gpu is the market for this cards

have good decoder and most of the big names like adobe or autodesk wil manage to make it work

and new apis like vulkan or dx12 donst need high optimized drivers

games based in opengl or dx11a re the real nightmare to this gpus